
Copyright }1^___ 



COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



COLLEGE TRAINING AND 
THE BUSINESS MAN 



PRESIDEKT THWING'S BOOKS 
ON COLLEGE SUBJECTS 

American Colleges : Their Students 
and Work. 

"Within College Walls. 

The College Woman. 

The American College in American 

Life. 
College Administration. 
A Liberal Education and a Liberal 

Faith. 

If I Were a College Student. 
The Choice of a College. 
College Training and the Business 
Pdan. 



COLLEGE TRAIIING AND 

THE BUSINESS MAI 



BY 



CHARLES F. THWING, LL. D. 

PRESIDENT OF WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY AND 
ADELBERT COLLEGE 




NEW VCRK ' ■' ' ' 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
1904 



Two Cooias Seceivsd 

APR 6 1904 



CLASS o>. X-Xc. No> 



5<5oA-'^ 



'Y 3 



ICioi^ 




COPTRIGHT, 1904, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



Published April, 190i 



PREFATORY NOTE 



For almost three hundred years the 
American college has been seeking to serve 
the higher interests of American life. It 
has been, and still is, supposed to bear a 
special relation of preparation for what are 
known as the *' learned professions." Bank- 
ing, transportation, insurance represent 
three great labors to which men in increas- 
ing numbers and of greater power have in 
recent years been giving themselves. The 
purpose of the following pages is to present 
the advantage which these three vocations, 
which no one calls '' learned," and which 
the work of general administration, may 
receive from the college. The purpose is 
in a way narrow ; but I venture to hope that 
in trying to gain it I have succeeded in 
illustrating some advantages which the col- 
lege may give to man as man. For, the 
great human worth of the college is incom- 
parably superior to its worth in training effi- 
cient administrators. 

C. F. T. 

Cleveland. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Prefatory Note v 

I. In GrEJS^ERAL AdMHSTISTRATION 1 

II. In Banking 43 

III. In Transportation 65 

IV. In Insurance . 91 

V. In Human Relations 123 



IN GENERAL ADMINISTRATION 



IN GENERAL ADMINISTRATION 

The world is becoming a vast industrial 
condition. The basis of society is changed 
from the military and the domestic to the 
economic and industrial. The conquest of 
the world by aggressive peoples is now made 
rather through the locomotive and the steel 
bridge than through the rifle. In this con- 
dition the United States is a leading power. 
But these industrial forces which spread 
themselves round the world are the strongest 
at home. The United States is both a vast 
machine-shop and a vast farm; and what 
lies between the shop and the farm is cov- 
ered by equally vast systems of railroads. 
These conditions are formed into great 
combinations of individuals and of capital. 
From the individual to the partnership, 
from the partnership to the corporation, 
from the corporation to the combination of 
corporations commonly known as the trust, 
is the order of development. 

3 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

This industrial process and also the uni- 
fying process in industry will undoubtedly 
continue. A great financier of New York 
has recently said that the uniting of banks 
and financial institutions would continue, if 
men could be found to manage the result- 
ing combinations. 

To this condition, therefore, in which 
the United States finds itself, as a manager 
of enormous business interests, what is the 
relation of the American college? What 
can the American college do to make these 
interests more worthy of humanity, and 
more helpful to the noblest and richest life? 
What, too, can the American college do 
to make these business interests themselves 
more efficient and more remunerative. 

The principal means which the Ameri- 
can college can use in helping the industrial 
condition lies in the furnishing of well- 
equipped workers. But some affirm that 
the college does not equip, much less well 
equip, its graduates to be workers in the 
world's hard work. A leader in American 
industrial life says : 

*' I do not think that the college graduate has 
any advantages in entering business over the grad- 

4 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

uate of a high or grammar school. My preference 
has always been for a boy to come to me direct from 
school and at the age of eighteen, because my ex- 
perience has sho^vn me that the four years spent in 
college are not worth as much to him, if he is to 
become a business man or manufacturer, as the same 
time in actual business experience. The average col- 
lege graduate is apt to feel that he is so educated 
that he is disinclined to begin at the bottom; or, if 
the case is exceptional and the yomig man is willing 
to begin on the lowest round of the ladder, he often 
becomes discouraged by seeing younger fellows in 
positions several years in advance of him. There is 
a great deal to be gained by the discipline of daily 
life that comes with drudgery, such as the washing 
of ink-stands, cleaning windows, carrying bundles, 
and sweeping out the store, although, unfortunately, 
for the boy's own good, the conditions are such at the 
present day that he is not called upon to do that 
work as was the custom a generation ago. I used 
to say that I did not care to hire a boy who owned 
a dress suit. Of course, there are exceptions; but, 
if one wants to succeed as a business man, he must 
begin by making sacrifices, and anything which 
shows a tendency toward extravagance is not a prom- 
ising indication. I would advise a boy of eighteen 
who wants to become a merchant, business man, or a 
distributor of products, to go into the business at 
that age and not go to college. I would not, however, 
underrate a college education. For a lawyer, a doc- 
tor, an engineer, or a successful member of any of 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

the other learned professions, I believe the university 
education is almost a necessity. The primary object 
of all education should be to teach boys and girls 
how to provide for themselves food, clothing, and 
shelter." 

The proposition which I desire to sup- 
port is, that the graduate of the American 
college, other things or qualities being the 
same, is best fitted to administer the great 
industrial movement. He is the one who, 
on the whole, can most wisely lead and most 
effectively carry forward the business in- 
terests of the United States. 

In order to get a fair field for our dis- 
cussion, in may be just as well promptly to 
clear away certain difficulties. Let me say 
at once that certain boys should not go to 
college. Boys who dislike study should 
not go, for they are in peril of becoming 
social rebels and pessimists. Boys who can 
not bear freedom should not go, for they 
are in peril of becoming slaves to unworthy 
habits. Boys who are lazy should not go, 
for they are in peril of adopting a soft, lux- 
urious life, which it is difficult to throw off 
and v/hich ill becomes the hard worker in 
the workaday world of the new America. 

6 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

Of course, the number of boys of these three 
classes is not small. The going to a college 
is not a question touching the mass, it is a 
question touching the individual. Whether 
the son of a family should or should not go 
to college, is a question as personal as was 
the question whether the parents of that son 
should in the first place become husband and 
wife. 

It is also evident that certain business 
callings demand a technical training. This 
training may be given, in part at least, 
through a college of liberal learning, or it 
may be given through a technical or scien- 
tific school. The work of the engineer, 
civil, mechanical, electrical, demands such a 
training. This training is as necessary to 
the engineer as is the training in law to the 
lawyer, or in medicine to the physician. 
Whether the engineer, before taking his 
technical studies, should first have the ad- 
vantage of a general college course is a ques- 
tion which does not immediately relate to the 
present discussion, although be it said in 
passing that opinion is coming to favor the 
view that the technical school is purely a 
professional school. 

7 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

The present discussion, moreover, does 
not concern the general advantages of a col- 
lege course. These advantages, in the form 
of making desirable friendships, promoting 
a high type of the gentleman, inspiring one 
to nobler service for society and the state, 
no one seeks to depreciate. They are great. 
Even were there no other results, they would 
make the college course worth while to most 
men. A graduate who entered the cattle 
business, in which, too, he was not success- 
ful, says of his college course : 

" I think I am safe in saying that if I had the 
decision to make over again I should take the college 
education. It may not make great returns on the 
investment, in actual money^ but to the man who has 
the taste and determination it makes^ I feel, ade- 
quate returns in the enlarged field he is given for the 
pursuits of his life with happiness to himself, and 
with some benefit to those about him." 

Now to the main proposition: The col- 
lege man in business is worth more than the 
same man would be without a college educa- 
tion. The elements that go to make up the 
value of the business man to his business are 
many; and the elements which go to make 

8 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

up the value of the college to the student are 
also many. 

First of them all is the intellectual 
element. The leader in a great business 
primarily needs, of all the intellectual parts, 
the power to think. " What do the men 
whom you employ," I asked the manager 
of one of the great industrial combinations, 
"need the most?" "Brains," was the 
prompt answer. " What do those men 
lack? " I said to a great manufacturer of 
steel and iron products. " Accuracy, the 
power to take a large view and to investi- 
gate thoroughly," was the reply. The mer- 
chant and the manufacturer are called on 
to analyze and synthesize phenomena, to re- 
late fact to fact and truth to truth, to assess 
every fact or truth at its proper value, to 
determine the significance of evidence, to 
reason logically, to relate principle to rule 
and rule to principle, to trace effect to cause, 
to distinguish the essential from the acci- 
dental, and to hold the necessary and essen- 
tial under a large variety of conditions and 
circumstances. 

These are the very intellectual qualities 
which the college is supposed to discipline. 
2 9 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

The knowledge which one gains in college 
is of no or small consequence. In fact, 
knowledge as an end is vastly overestimated 
in all educational judgments, and knowledge 
as a means to power is as vastly underesti- 
mated. Two friends of mine have recently 
said to me, in answer to my question regard- 
ing the good of a college course to them, 
that it consists in the cultivation of the 
primary intellectual quality of thinking. 
One says: 

" College training teaches one to go to work at 
any task with system and method^ in the conscious- 
ness that one has acquired the ability to thinJe 
through, quickly and logically, the questions which 
come up"; and another says: " College training has 
enabled me to appreciate more fully and to practise 
more diligently precision and system. Unless I am 
very much mistaken the close of my academic life 
finds me much stronger from the point of view both 
of synthesis and of analysis." 

The men now placed at the head of great 
industrial corporations believe that this in* 
tellectual quality is of large value. Mr. W. 
F. Merrill, long associated with the New 
York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad 
Company, says: 

10 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

** It has been my experience that men with a col- 
lege education make better help than men of about the 
same caliber who have not had that advantage, when 
they get to a point where their experience warrants 
putting them into advanced positions; and that it 
does not take them so long a time to get to a point 
where they can be safely promoted. A college 
education gives a young man habits of study and 
application which are invaluable. He learns how to 
use his brains to better advantage than one who has 
not had that training. You might just as well say 
that an apprenticeship is of no value to a man who 
is going to follow a particular trade as to say, in 
the case of a man who is going to use his brains, it 
is not an advantage to him that he should learn to 
use them logically by study. Brains are capable of 
development the same as muscles, and there is noth- 
ing that I know of that will develop brains any 
faster than systematic study. A well-trained mind 
thinks more quickly and reaches results more speed- 
ily and more accurately." ^ 

In the personality therefore of the in- 
dividual student the chief effect resulting 
from the college is intellectual, and the chief 
element in this effect is the increase in what, 
in a comprehensive and general way, one 
calls the power of thinking. But this is not 

* The Utility of an Academic Education : An Investigation, 
by R. T. Crane, p. 27. 

11 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

the only effect. Intellectual elements do 
not alone constitute the causes that promote 
the prosperity of the individual or of the 
community. Some would say that volitional, 
emotional, ethical elements constitute causes 
more important than the intellectual. It is 
certainly true that a strong will makes as 
much toward the advancement of one or of 
all as a clear intellect. For in a strong will 
are embodied ambition, diligence, persist- 
ence — qualities of superlative worth. Some 
would also say that an honest conscience is 
as important as either clear intellect or 
strong will. 

Now, the training of the will in the col- 
lege is a thing much more difficult to accom- 
plish than the training of the intellect. For 
the will is trained by doing, and doing is not 
the primary function of the college, though 
it is one of its functions. This inability 
of the college to train the will in adequate 
ways is the chief cause of the impression 
that a college education is of no advan- 
tage to the business man, the man whose 
life consists so largely in doing things. But 
let no one suppose that the college does noth- 
ing in the training of the will. Every effort 

12 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

of the student to master a scholastic problem 
is an act of the will. Every decision he 
makes for better or for worse is an act of 
the will. All co-operative endeavors of col- 
lege men, and such endeavors are numerous 
and of great variety, represent the executive 
function. Not a few men in every college 
class get larger training for their will than 
for their intellect. 

But now reverts the question of intel- 
lectual relations. Let it be granted that 
the modern business man does need the 
power of thinking. How does the college 
increase this power more effectively than 
business itself? 

Thinking is an art. It is, of course, also, 
a science. But for the college man it is 
primarily an art. An art is learned by prac- 
tising it. Thinking is, therefore, learned 
by thinking. It represents habits of intel- 
lectual accuracy, discrimination, comparison, 
concentration. Such habits are formed by 
being accurate, discriminating, and by the 
actual concentration of the mind. A course 
in education promotes such thinking better 
than a course in business. For education 
represents orderliness and system in intel- 

13 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

lectual effort. The eiFort proceeds by cer- 
tain graduated steps, from the easy to the 
less easy, from the difficult to the more diffi- 
cult. The purpose is to train in the valua- 
tion of principles, which underlie all service, 
and not in the worth of rules, which are of 
special and narrow application. The man 
trained only in business of one kind is not 
fitted to take up business of a different 
kind. The broadly trained man is prepared 
to learn business of any kind, and if business 
of one kind has been learned, he is able to 
leave it to take up work of another kind 
without difficulty. The practise of any art 
should make the one who practises this art 
a better thinker in it ; but this advantage re- 
lates in a large degree to one who has first 
approached the art through thinking. 

I suppose it may be said that the man 
who is self-educated is usually very nar- 
rowly educated. He is educated along and 
in certain lines. He is educated, so to speak, 
tangentially. His thinking, too, is usualjy 
tangential. It lacks comprehensiveness and 
a sense of relations. It has force, and the 
endeavors which spring out of it are force- 
ful; but breadth is sacrificed. 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

Many and of much variety are the meth- 
ods adopted to reheve the individual of the 
necessity of educating himself. Schools of 
correspondence and evening schools have 
their place, and for not a few their place 
is large. So thoroughly worthy are these 
forms of education that they should be pro- 
moted, theu' weaknesses eliminated, and their 
points of strength conserved. But the peril 
against which one is to be on guard in these 
more or less informal methods is the peril of 
substituting knowledge for thinking, infor- 
mation for personal inspiration, formal con- 
tent of learning for large power of achieve- 
ment. 

These perils inhere alike in the more 
popular and informal methods of education 
and in that technical and commercial edu- 
cation which the individual gets in business. 
The education of the college and university 
seeks to avoid these perils. The university 
offers opportunities for reasoning and for 
thinking of all kinds, degrees, orders. It 
sets forth the exact reasoning of the mathe- 
matical sciences — sciences in which things 
are as they are, as Bishop Butler says, and 
must be as they must be. It thus confirms 

15 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

the habit of intellectual conviction. It sets 
forth the general reasonings of language, 
literature, history, and philosophy, in which 
truth is to be separated from truth for see- 
ing each more clearly, in which truth is to 
be united with truth for establishing both 
more firmly. It uses analysis and synthesis. 
It uses deductive reasoning and inductive 
reasoning. It recognizes the uncertainties 
attending intellectual judgments; a recog- 
nition which fixes a habit of intellectual 
humility. It seeks to assess each fact at 
its proper value, to use right methods of 
intellectual procedure, to maintain each 
faculty of man's whole being in the per- 
formance of its proper function, without 
interference from other faculties, and to 
bring forth a well-ordered character as the 
consummate result. 

In this endeavor the content of knowl- 
edge plays a less important part than is com- 
monly believed. Content of knowledge for 
intellectual processes is somewhat akin to 
content of food for physical processes; the 
purpose is not to retain the content, but to 
convert the content into health and power. 
In the intellectual relation, too, as in the 

16 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

physical, one's appetite is a pretty good 
guide for the selection of content. Cer- 
tainly no other guide is so good, or so little 
unworthy, unworthy as at times it may 
prove to be. To choose certain courses of 
study in college because one does not like 
them, on the ground that the dislike rep- 
resents a certain lack of nature which these 
studies may help to fill, may have a certain 
degree, though small, of reasonableness. 
Such choices are medicines. Medicines are 
necessary, if one be sick. But the mind 
of the college man should be treated as if 
it were in a state of health. It, therefore, 
needs, not medicine, but food. To choose 
courses of study in college because one does 
like them, represents the hygienic process 
of assimilation which results in strength, 
health, growth. 

It will usually be found, too, that studies 
thus chosen are most directly preparatory 
to one's probable calling in life. For the 
desire which determines the choice of studies 
also determines the choice of a vocation. 
President Eliot writes of his son, Charles: 

*' He arrived at the end of his Senior year with- 
out having any distinct vision of the profession which 

17 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

awaited him, neither he nor his father having per- 
ceived his special gifts. Nevertheless, it turned out, 
after he had settled with joy on his profession, that, 
if he had known at the beginning of his Sophomore 
year what his profession was to be, he could not have 
selected his studies better than he did with only the 
guidance of his likings and natural interests. He 
took during his last three years in college all the 
courses in fine arts which were open to him; he sub- 
sequently found his French and German indispen- 
sable for wide reading in the best literature of his 
profession; his studies in science supplied both train- 
ing and information appropriate to his calling; and 
history and political economy were useful to him as 
culture studies and for their social bearings." ^ 

The college course which Charles Eliot 
took was on the whole a broad and a broad- 
ening one. It was not so broad that it be- 
came thin or a means of intellectual dissi- 
pation. The broad course is always in peril 
of becoming a little thin and the narrow 
course of becoming constricted. A course 
can safely to a degree become narrow in case 
a man knows the channel in which his life 
is to flow. But most men do not so know. 
" I am to-day thirty years old ; I graduate 
as a mechanical engineer. I now know I 

^ Charles Eliot : Landscape Architect, pp. 28-^9. 

18 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

do not want to be a mechanical engineer. 
I want to be a lawyer." So said a student 
on the Commencement Day of his Scientific 
School. Ignorance of one's abilities or de- 
sires or opportunities should lead one to a 
broad course of study in the college. Even 
many of the great manufacturing corpora- 
tions prefer the liberally to the technically 
trained graduate. Said a member of a 
great corporation which builds steel mills 
round the world : 

" The man of liberal education is^ on the whole, 
worth more to us than the man of technical training. 
He is worth less for a year or two after coming to us, 
but he has a power for learning all branches of our 
business which is of great value." 

The peril of over-education, for those 
who are to enter business, is a peril in the 
existence of which I find not a few " captains 
of industry " believe. By over-education is 
meant an education of the intellect which 
fits the individual to do a higher work than 
is actually open to him, or a higher work 
than his other faculties fit him to do. The 
point at which this danger touches the col- 
lege relates to the equilibrium of personal 

19 



COLLEGE TKAINING 

forces. The college may draw too heavily 
on the intellectual resources of the indi- 
vidual. Strength, which in the course of 
his college career he should have given to 
the will, the conscience, the heart, the body, 
may have been given to the intellect. As 
a result, the graduate may come forth from 
the college halls bearing a mind disciplined 
to think, but lacking the power of body or 
of will to use this disciplined mind. He is 
like an engine, perfect in every part, but 
without sufficient steam. Mr. S. R. Calla- 
way, formerly president of the New York 
Central Railroad, writes me that a friend 
of the late Commodore Vanderbilt bore to 
him from Lord Palmerston a message that 
it was " a pity a man with so much talent 
had not the advantages which education 
gives." " You tell Lord Palmerston from 
me," said the Commodore, " that if I had 
learned education I would not have had time 
to learn anything else." It is a story be- 
neath the humor of which, says Mr. Calla- 
way, although himself in favor of the gen- 
eral principle presented in these pages, " Hes 
more or less reality." The peril of the over- 
education of the intellect is simply the peril 

20 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

of the under-education of the will, of the 
conscience, of the heart, of the body. This 
peril is to be avoided not so much by lessen- 
ing the education of the intellect as by in- 
creasing the education of the body, the 
heart, conscience, and will. The members 
of the British cabinets of the last twenty- 
five and more years illustrate the advantage 
of a well-proportioned education. All have 
been, with hardly an exception, graduates of 
either Oxford or Cambridge ; not a few have 
been honor men. One never forgets Glad- 
stone, or Peel, with his double first-class. 
But besides whatever intellectual power they 
possessed, they have been men of great 
strength of body, and of distinct force of 
will. Unique strength of character has 
not segregated them from their fellows. 
They have been at once commanders and 
servants, men and gentlemen, golf -players 
and thinkers. 

Business of every sort requires men of 
power: power of intellect, to think; of will, 
to do; of conscience, to do right; of heart, to 
appreciate; of body, to originate and to en- 
dure. Some men possess these manifold 
powers more largely without a liberal educa- 

21 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

tion than other men with a liberal education. 
But the purpose of the college is not to make 
men equal, but to develop each to his utmost 
capacity of development. As a rule, both 
the ablest men and the men not ablest by 
nature would become still more able by 
reason of a liberal education. This is the 
meaning, I take it, of Professor Elihu 
Thomson, who writes saying: 

" The boy who does not go to college enters busi- 
ness life earlier,, gets an early start, and perhaps 
loses less of the power of adaptation to his surround- 
ings. The older a man is, the less pliable he be- 
comes; but men differ very widely in this particular 
— some crystallize very early, others only in ad- 
vanced age. Nevertheless, I do think that in the 
great majority of cases whatever disadvantage is at 
first suffered is more than made up in the end. I 
can see no reason why higher education should pre- 
vent or lessen success in business affairs, which suc- 
cess depends upon good judgment and energy. In 
manufacturing, and I think to an increasing extent 
in most business undertakings, a training which 
leans toward the scientific and technical will^ I be- 
lieve, be of the greatest value. This involves mathe- 
matical proficiency in greater or less degree; not 
mathematics as an abstraction, but in relation to 
the concrete realities." 

And another says : 

^2 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

** If a young man forms no bad habits during his 
college course^ he can well afford to invest four 
years' time in return for the college friendships, 
and, more especially, the taste for reading, for study, 
and the higher and better things of life; and if he 
accomplishes no more than acquiring such tastes, his 
time will be well spent in the pleasure and satisfac- 
tion that he will receive throughout his life, and in 
his ability, when he is able to do so, to retire from 
active business, without feeling that he can enjoy 
nothing but business. A young man of ability, 
strong, tactful, determined to succeed, will succeed, 
with or -without a college education; and if he has 
to work his own way through college so much the 
better for him, for he starts with a distinct advan- 
tage over his fellow-students. Such a young man as 
I have described will soon overtake those that started 
in business four years before he did, and his mental 
training should give him a marked advantage over 
those that have not received it.'* 

This question of the value of a college 
training to the man entering business I have 
discussed simply on the narrow basis of the 
commercial service. Of course there is an- 
other basis, and one which some would call 
more important. One of my friends speaks 
of a college course as fitting one " bet- 
ter to discern and like all that is noble 
and beautiful in life "; and another: " Col- 

23 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

lege education ought to make him a more 
reasonable man, and to increase his capacity 
for enjoyment throughout life." These 
are values in themselves; and, if one were 
inclined to urge the point, one could show 
that these values have also commercial 
worth. One also may be allowed to say that 
if civilization is to advance, it is to advance, 
not simply through the self ward tendency of 
the individual and of individual effort, be 
that tendency either material or intellectual 
or ethical, but also through altruistic move- 
ments. One likes to quote Burke's words: 
" Society is a partnership in all science, a 
partnership in all art, a partnership in every 
virtue and in all perfection." It is a part- 
nership including generations yet unborn. 
As one reflects on the condition of the pres- 
ent age, as one reflects on the life of the 
future centuries, one realizes that the higher 
life of the whole race has claims upon those 
who Hve in the first decade of the twentieth 
century. That chief claim is to make large 
men. 

This discussion is made forceful by lib- 
eral extracts from a few of the many letters 
written to me by the heads of great business 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

corporations touching the value of a college 
training. The first which I submit is from 
Mr. Hugh J. Chisholm, president of the 
International Paper Company: 

" I regard a man equipped with a college edu- 
cation, two years' technical and two years' law- 
school training, as the best-equipped material to 
build upon, if he is entering into and expecting to 
follow a manufacturing, mercantile, or banking busi- 
ness; and, after a man trained in this way gets the 
practical knowledge of the business in which he en- 
gages, he has a better combination of qualities than 
the man possessing knowledge acquired from prac- 
tical encountering or conducting of any of the above 
referred to lines of business, whose education is con- 
fined to that which he has received from the high 
school. The very serious objection, however, to ac- 
quiring such a college education as outlined above, is 
the time it consumes, assuming that it takes from four 
to six years as the shortest time possible to so equip 
a young man. The boy who leaves the high school 
and commences at once from that point to get prac- 
tical knowledge of the business or commercial life, 
has certainly an advantage later in life when he en- 
counters the college graduate who is just commen- 
cing his business career, and by the lack of this prac- 
tical, technical knowledge, the college graduate is 
handicapped when brought in competition with the 
young man who has devoted his time to the learning 
of the business into which he may have entered. 

3 25 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

But, assuming that they both possess equal mental 
and physical ability, in the four or six years follow- 
ing, the college graduate ought to excel the young 
man whose education has been confined to the high 
school. In my judgment, the college presidents of 
the present day have no more serious problem to in- 
telligently and practically work out than that of 
properly establishing a course of studies in the great 
colleges of this country, which will take into consid- 
eration how best to educate and equip that portion of 
their students who intend to follow a commercial call- 
ing rather than a profession, realizing, as every 
thinking man does to-day, the great demand that has 
been created for the highest type of intellectual 
ability, integrity, and executive ability, necessary to 
manage successfully and honestly the great amount 
of capital that has been and is being concentrated 
in the large industrial corporations of this country." 

Mr. John W. Dunn, president of the In- 
ternational Steam Pump Company, says: 

" I believe that the theoretical f oimdation which 
a young man receives at a well-conducted college can 
be of great use to him in after-life, provided that on 
leaving college he is willing to begin at the bottom of 
the ladder to learn practically any business he may 
choose to enter upon, without bringing with him any 
false idea that the learning that he has acquired 
from his books and his professors absolves him from 
going through precisely the same course of practical 

26 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

training that he would have had to undergo if he had 
gone directly from high school to a shop or factory. 
We have in our various companies a number of young 
men who are graduates of the various technical in- 
stitutes^ and whom we are willing to assist in mak- 
ing their way, provided they are content to begin as 
common operatives, like any ordinary working-man 
who is to earn his living. To any young man who is 
content to take up his work in this frame of mind, I 
believe that a prefessional education will be of great 
value after he has thoroughly mastered the prac- 
tical details of his work, and familiarized himself 
with those matters which can only be acquired by 
actual experience, and by actual contact with busi- 
ness and with men. Any young man, however, who 
is imbued with a belief that because he has gone 
through college he has nothing further to learn, and 
is superior to the necessities which those who have 
had no such advantages are compelled to recognize, 
will find that his college education is not only of no 
benefit to him, but is a positive hindrance to his suc- 
cess in life." 

Mr. J. Ogden Armour, of Chicago, 
through his secretary states : 

" That, in his opinion, the solution of this ques- 
tion, as far as commercial success is concerned, is 
not so much one of the abstract value of advanced 
education, as compared with that obtained in the 
public schools, as it is of adaptability to the chosen 

27 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

pursuit of the student. He, of course, recognizes the 
very great value of a complete education, but he 
thinks it to be largely measured, in relation to 
success in commercial affairs, by the trustworthi- 
ness, ambition, and perseverance that accompany it. 
With these fundamental qualifications, and others 
which naturally suggest themselves, opportunities 
for a successful career would unquestionably occur. 
Mr. Armour's action regarding employees in his own 
business is practically wholly independent of the 
possession by them of exceptional educational advan- 
tages. He does not, however, desire to underrate 
the desirability of the highest education possible, but 
thinks that commercial success is chiefly dependent 
upon qualifications which niay or may not accompany 
exceptional scholastic attainment.'* 

Mr. Powell Stackhouse, of the Cambria 
Steel Company, says: 

" I hold that a young man of proper physical and 
mental balance cannot be overeducated. In the man- 
ufacture of steel (and the same is true of any mod- 
ern manufacturing operations), a thorough technical 
education is an essential, as without it a limit of ad- 
vancement will sooner or later be reached. In the 
commercial line it may not be so essential, but is a 
great advantage. It is true that there are many 
notable men who, without the advantages of a tech- 
nical education, have risen to the top of their pro- 
fession; these are the exceptions in many thousands, 

28 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

and are only such as have the natural ability, coupled 
with great perseverance and the self-denial after- 
ward to educate themselves, and they can not be raised 
as objections, but as an incentive to a thorough col- 
lege education. It does not follow by any means 
that because a young man has passed a college life 
with credit, he will necessarily be a success in any 
line he may select. He has only been furnished with 
the mental tools to work with, and their after appli- 
cation depends upon his use and the opportunities 
thereby afforded. Any failure of a young man to 
secure the most advanced education he possibly can 
must in some time of his future life operate detri- 
mentally." 

Such witnesses I might continue to sum- 
mon. But I refrain. I do, however, wish 
to call another witness, who is usually sup- 
posed to be opposed to the men who are to 
undertake great business affairs going to 
college. I refer to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. 

There is reason to fear that injustice has 
been done Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The in- 
justice is not lack of appreciation or ingrati- 
tude. The whole American people, and 
many individuals of its eighty millions, are 
grateful to him for his manifold labor of 
love. He is indeed a prince, and more 
than a prince, in beneficence. But the in- 

29 



,/ 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

justice does consist in a failure to appreciate 
what are Mr. Carnegie's real views about 
the worth of a liberal education. It is 
usually supposed that Mr. Carnegie is op- 
posed to the college as a means of training 
men for business. To be sure he has given 
good ground for this supposition. Yet he 
has also given other and better ground for 
the assurance that the education offered by 
the college may prove to be of great worth 
to the manufacturer and the merchant. 

In an address ^ given to the students 
of a commercial college at Pittsburg, in 
1885, Mr. Carnegie said: 

** Look out for the boy who has to plunge into 
work direct from the common school, and who begins 
by sweeping out the office. He is the probable dark 
horse that you had better watch." 

Four years after in an address given to 
the workmen at the dedication of the Car- 
negie Library, at Braddock, he said: 

** In my own experience I can say that I have 
known few young men intended for business who 
were not injured by a collegiate education. Had they 

' This and the following extracts are from Mr. Carnegie's 
Empire of Business. 

30 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

gone into active work during the yenrs spent in college 
they would have been better educated men in every 
sense of that term. The fire and energy have been 
stamped out of them^ and how to so manage as to 
live a life of idleness and not a life of usefulness 
has become the chief question with them. . . . The 
point I wish to make is this_, that, except for the 
few, who have the taste of the antiquarian, and who 
find that their work in life is to delve among the 
musty records of the past, and for the few that lead 
professional lives, the education given to-day in our 
colleges is a positive disadvantage." 

Later, in the New York Tribune, in 
1890, he wrote: 

"The almost total absence of the graduate from 
high position in the business world seems to justify 
the conclusion that college education as it exists 
seems almost fatal to success in that domain." 

Anything more direct and explicit than 
this it would be hard to find in the definition 
of certain deficiencies of the college. 

Yet in 1896 Mr. Carnegie, addressing 
the members of Cornell University on 
"Business," uses the following language: 

** The graduates of our colleges and universities 
in former years graduated while yet in their teens. 
We have changed this, and graduates are older, as 

SI 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

a rule, when they enter upon life's struggle, but they 
are taught much more. Unless the young university 
man employs his time to the very best advantage in 
acquiring knowledge upon the pursuit of which he 
is to make the chief business of his life, he will enter 
business at a disadvantage with younger men who 
enter in their teens, although lacking in university 
education. This goes without saying. Now, the 
question is: Will the graduate who has dwelt in the 
region of theory overtake the man who has been for 
a year or two in advance of him, engaged in the hard 
and stern educative field of practise? 

" That it is possible for the graduate to do so 
also goes without sajang, and that he should in after 
life possess views broader than the ordinary business 
man, deprived of university education, is also certain, 
and, of course, the race in life is to those whose 
record is best at the end; the beginning is forgotten 
and is of no moment. But if the graduate is ever 
to overtake the first starter in the race, it must be 
by possessing stronger staying powers; his superior 
knowledge leading to sounder judgment must be 
depended upon to win the race at the finish. A few 
disadvantages he must strenuously guard against, the 
lack of severe self -discipline, of strenuous concen- 
tration, and intense ambition, which usually charac- 
terize the man who starts before the habits of man- 
hood are formed. 

** The exceptional graduate should excel the ex- 
ceptional non-graduate. He has more education, and 
education will always tell, the other qualities being 

S2 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

equal. Take two men of equal natural ability_, en- 
ergy, and the same ambition and characteristics, and 
the man who has received the best, widest, most suit- 
able education has the advantage over the other, un- 
doubtedly." 

Mr. Carnegie also characterizes a sound 
and liberal education as " the most precious 
possession." 

Eleven years have passed since the ad- 
dress was given to the students of the com- 
mercial college, and seven have passed since 
the address was given at Braddock. Either 
the lapse of time or the change in the char- 
acter of the audience, or the change in the 
environment has dulled the edge of the op- 
position to a liberal education. But even 
in the Braddock address are found intima- 
tions of a liking for certain elements which 
help to constitute a liberal education. The 
" reading of the masters in literature " is 
urged as an important duty. And is not 
the reading of the masters a serious part of 
a college course? Insistence is also had on 
the study of economic questions. For, as 
he says: 

" In these days of transition and of struggles be- 
tween labor and capital, to no better purpose can 

33 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

you devote a few of your spare hours than to the 
study of economic questions. There are certain 
great laws which will be obeyed; the law of supply 
and demand; the law of competition; the law of 
wages and of profits. All these you will find laid 
down in the text-books^ and remember that there is 
no more possibility of defeating the operation of 
these laws than there is of thwarting the laws of 
nature which determine the humidity of the atmos- 
phere or the revolution of the earth upon its axis.** 

Are not such principles, principles which 
the college seeks to interpret and to apply? 

But Mr. Carnegie expresses his belief 
in the value of technical education, and also 
in rather a broad type of technical educa- 
tion. He tells the Braddock workmen that 

" The value of the education which young men 
can now receive can not be overestimated, and it 
is to this education^ as given in technical schools, 
to which I wish to call your attention. Time was 
when men had so little knowledge that it was easy 
for one man to embrace it all^ and the courses 
in colleges bear painful evidence of this fact to- 
day. Knowledge is now so various^ so extensive, 
so minute^ that it is impossible for any man to 
know thoroughly more than one small branch. This 
is the age of the specialist; therefore you who 
have to make your living in this world should resolve 

34 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

to know the art which gives you support; to know 
that thoroughly and well, to be an expert in your 
specialty. If you are a mechanic, then from this 
library study every work bearing upon the subject 
of mechanics. If you are a chemist, then every work 
bearing upon chemistry. If you are at the blast-fur- 
naces, then every work upon the blast-furnaces. If 
in the mines, then every work upon mining. Let no 
man know more of your specialty than you do your- 
self." 

He also says, in 1890, in a letter to the 
New York Tribune : 

** There has come, however, in recent years, the 
polytechnic and scientific school, or course of study, 
for boys, which is beginning to show most valuable 
fruits in the manufacturing branch. The trained 
mechanic of the past, who has, as we have seen, 
hitherto carried off most of the honors in our in- 
dustrial works, is now to meet a rival in the scien- 
tifically educated youth, who will push him hard — 
very hard indeed. Three of the largest steel manu- 
facturing concerns in the world are already under 
the management of three young educated men — 
students at these schools who left theory at school 
for practise in the works while yet in their teens. 
Walker, Illinois Steel Company, Chicago; Schwab, 
Edgar Thomson Works; Potter, Homestead Steel 
Works, Pittsburg, are types of the new product — 
not one of them yet thirty. Most of the chiefs of 

35 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

departments under them are of the same class. 
Some young educated men have one important advan- 
tage over the apprenticed mechanic — they are open- 
minded and without prejudice. The scientific attitude 
of mind, that of the searcher after truth, renders 
them receptive of new ideas. Great and invaluable 
as the working mechanic has been, and is, and will 
alwajT^s be, yet he is disposed to adopt narrow views 
of affairs, for he is generally well up in j'^ears before 
he comes into power. It is different with the scien- 
tifically trained boy; he has no prejudices, and goes 
in for the latest invention or newest method, no mat- 
ter if another has discovered it. He adopts the plan 
that will beat the record and discards his own devices 
or ideas, which the working mechanic superintendent 
can rarely be induced to do. Let no one, therefore, 
underrate the advantages of education; only it must 
be education adapted to the end in view; and must 
give instruction bearing upon a man's career if he 
is to make his way to fortune." 

Most men, I am sure, assent to these 
judgments and sentiments. The value of 
specialization, on both its negative and posi- 
tive side, and the value, too, of an education 
in principles as opposed to the value of an 
education consisting of rule of thumb, or 
rules of thumb, all do appreciate. 

It is at this point that one can enter into 
the consideration of the principles which 

S6 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

underlie Mr. Carnegie's conception of the 
worth of education. 

There are two forces which construct the 
whole ellipse of Mr. Carnegie's philosophy 
of business success: They are will and judg- 
ment. He believes in the " indomitable 
will." AH those habits of thrift which he 
eulogizes arise from a strong and good will. 
Honesty and honor, too, are volitional ele- 
ments.* Such also is concentration. " The 
question of questions: Is he honest and true? 
. . . Gentlemen, this is the crucial ques- 
tion, the keystone of the arch ; for no amount 
of ability is of the slightest avail without 
honor." And also " that indispensable 
quality — j udgment." 

Now, when one seeks to reach the basis 
of the objections of Mr. Carnegie to college 
men in business, one finds it, at least in part, 
at this point : The college man lacks a strong 
will. For he says of graduates, " The fii^e 
and energy have been stamped out of them, 
and how to so manage as to live a life of 
idleness and not a life of usefulness has be- 
come the chief question with them." One is 
inclined to agree with Mr. Carnegie to an 
extent. The disadvantage to which the col- 

37 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

lege subjects its students is the disadvantage 
of training the intellect at the expense of 
other faculties. Education is, or should be, 
fivefold or sixfold: it should give the stu- 
dent a body strong and supple; an intellect 
able to think; a heart to love; a conscience 
for righteousness; an imagination to appre- 
ciate the beautiful; and a will strong to 
choose. Into each of these faculties or 
functions, the intellectual process enters to a 
degree ; into each of them, too, the volitional 
power enters. But we know that the intel- 
lect may so draw on the volitional element 
in character that its own volitional force is 
specifically weakened. In the case of cer- 
tain college students this result does occur. 
They become flabby and soft. They were 
flabby and soft by nature, and college has 
rather accentuated the natural weakness. 
But I wish to deny at once that such a re- 
sult, the result of weakness of will, is a 
natural or inevitable result of college train- 
ing. It is no more the characteristic of a 
college course than killing workmen is char- 
acteristic of the process of making steel. 
Men are killed in making steel; students, 
too, have the force and energy of manhood 

38 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

depleted in college; but neither process is 
characteristic. 

The result, too, of the decline of the 
force of will is far less characteristic than 
it used to be. The whole elective system 
works against the decline. The combination 
of the college course and the professional 
school course is against the decline. The 
whole athletic movement is mightily against 
it, both in the sports themselves and in all 
arrangements prerequisite to the sports. 
The whole life of the undergraduates, as 
undergraduates, in societies, fraternities, 
and clubs, is against it. 

The other of the two forces which Mr. 
Carnegie eulogizes as necessary for the tri- 
umph of the individual or of democracy is 
judgment. What he says, in places many 
and under conditions diverse, is worth quot- 
ing; 

" Without judgment a business man amounts to 
nothing " ; " you will find that the one that failed, 
lacked judgment; he had not calculated the means 
to the end ; was a foolish fellow ; had not trained him- 
self " ; " and he has shown that he has also that in- 
dispensable quality — judgment"; "now what may be 
claimed for business as a career is that the man in 

39 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

business is called upon to deal with an ever-changing 
variety of questions. He must have an all-roimd 
judgment based upon knowledge of many subjects "; 
** if without sound, all-round judgment, he must 
fail " ; " these improvements and inventions come 
from the educated- — educated in the true sense — and 
never from the ignorant workman. They must come, 
and they do come, from men who are in their special 
department men of more knowledge than their fel- 
lows. If they have not read, then they have ob- 
served, which is the best form of education. The 
important fact is that they must know; how the 
knowledge was acquired, it matters not. The fact that 
they know more about a problem than their fellows 
and are able to suggest the remedy or improvement, 
is what is of value to them and their employer." 

At length have I made these extracts for 
they are of great significance. They give 
evidence amounting to proof that sound 
judgment is the chief intellectual quality 
which Mr. Carnegie believes is required in 
business. Of course, it is, one might add. 
Who ever doubted it? 

But the signal significance of this con- 
clusion lies in the fact that the training of 
a sound judgment is the supreme intel- 
lectual purpose of the college. Of course, 
its purpose is not cram. Knowledge is not 

40 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

its final cause. Knowledge, learning, books, 
teaching, are all means, methods, or condi- 
tions for creating and for disciplining a 
sound judgment. Ask a hundred men 
graduating of what intellectual value the 
college has been to them, and the one com- 
prehensive answer given, of course, under a 
multiplicity of forms, will be the training 
of the judgment. The college teaches the 
student to assess a fact at its proper worth, 
to relate truth to truth, and truths to truths, 
and from the two truths or the many to infer 
a new truth. Discrimination, analysis, syn- 
thesis are at once causes and results of its 
manifold discipline. The college offers an 
education, as Cardinal Newman so nobly 
declares, " which gives a man a clear con- 
scious view of his own opinions and judg- 
ments, a truth in developing them, an elo- 
quence in expressing them, and a force in 
urging them. It teaches him to see things 
as they are, to go right to the point, to dis- 
entangle a skein of thought, to detect what 
is sophistical, and to discard what is irrele- 
vant. It prepares him to fill any post with 
credit, and to master any subject with 
f acihty. It shows him how to accommodate 
4 41 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

himself to others, how to throw himself into 
their state of mind, how to bring before 
them his own, how to influence them, how to 
come to an understanding with them, how 
to bear with them." ^ 

Mr. Carnegie believes that the quahty 
of judgment is the great intellectual need 
of the business man. The training of men 
of sound judgment is the highest intel- 
lectual purpose of the college. It has none 
other; no purpose less high or less broad 
could be at all worthy of either the college 
or of himianity. Its purpose is in a most 
practical way to train thinkers in industrial 
affairs. The thinker in industrial affairs is 
not simply the captain, he is the general. 
Managers who can think, the college is 
making. They are of the type who Mr. 
Carnegie says " never do any work them- 
selves worth speaking about; their point is 
to make others work while they think." 
The making of the thinker is the highest 
intellectual result of the college. 

* Idea of a University, p. 178. 



n 



II 

IN BANKING 



43 



IN BANKING 

The work of the banker is simple, plain, 
easy; the business of banking is elaborate, 
complex, difficult. The ordinary service 
which the ordinary employee of the ordinary 
bank renders is a service which a good 
graduate of a good grammar school should 
be able to render with ease. This service 
consists largely in keeping books. Its proc- 
esses are arithmetical. Its duties are not 
difficult, and they are learned by doing. No 
college education is needed for doing such 
work. 

But in its large relations banking rep- 
resents the business of the world. A bank 
is the clearing-house of all kinds of manu- 
facturing, commercial, financial processes 
and concerns. The debtor and creditor 
class meet in a bank. The material results 
of modern civilization — its foresight, wis- 
dom, struggle, triumph — are most signifi- 
cantly embodied in a bank. The material 
reservoir, too, from which the material forces 

45 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

of the civilization of the future can be most 
effectively drawn is a bank. The intima- 
tions of impending disaster are here first 
felt. The methods for thwarting financial 
blasting and mildew, or for escaping finan- 
cial tornadoes, are here elaborated ; the meth- 
ods, too, for lessening the damages which 
these disasters may have already wrought 
are discussed and decided in a bank. The 
reciprocal relations of all forms of business, 
the relations of the people to the Govern- 
ment and of the Government to the people, 
the relations of social class to social class, 
find their microcosm in a bank. Before 
France and Austria go to war, their finan- 
cial representatives consult the bankers; and 
the terms of peace are determined at least 
somewhat, and may be essentially dictated, 
by the bankers of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or 
London. When Mr. Matthew Arnold 
wrote that he had bought some Spanish, 
Italian, and Turkish stocks in order to keep 
his interest in modern history alive, he could 
have been assured that the same essential 
and comprehensive result might have been 
secured by his buying a few shares in a 
great bank. 

46 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

Therefore, whether it is expedient for 
the young man who proposes to be a banker 
first to go to college depends largely upon 
his conception of the work which he desires 
to do in and through a bank. In case he is 
content to be a good bookkeeper, or an ac- 
curate teller, he will not find a college edu- 
cation of special worth to himself; in case 
he desires to be a banker of large relations, 
he will find a college education, I venture to 
say, of very great value. 

The primary intellectual element in the 
value of a college education to a banker, as 
to most men, lies in the enlargement and en- 
richment of the power of thinking. A col- 
lege education develops, or at least aims to 
develop, the power of seeing, of reasoning, 
of judgment, of comparison, of apprecia- 
tion. The graduate is supposed to know 
truths, or what is more, to know truth — 
to know truth through knowing truths. 
He is able to have a comprehensive notion 
of his work. He sees the relation of part 
to part, of each part to the whole, and of 
the whole to each part. Its elements of 
strength and of weakness, its points that 
require emphasis and elaboration, its points 

47 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

that require no care, its adjustments and 
readjustments, its progress and regress — 
these and many other parts he is to consider. 
Financial schemes which have the substance 
of the " South- Sea Bubble " he is to distin- 
guish from undertakings that are as solid as 
the Treasury of the United States, or the 
Bank of England. Such discriminations, 
in advance and on a priori grounds, it would 
seem to be easy to make: for a large gulf 
divides the counterfeit from the genuine, 
the inevitably disastrous from the assuredly 
triumphant. But experience both recent 
and remote, proves that not only the ordi- 
nary body of the American people but also 
that part of it which is not ordinary becomes 
easily and disastrously confounded in re- 
spect to financial theories and movements. 
The fact is that money represents one of the 
most difficult problems to which the reason 
of man ever gives itself. Trained in and 
through general studies, trained in and 
through economic subjects, the college 
graduate, becoming a banker, is often and 
distressingly mistaken ; but he would be mis- 
taken with greater frequency and severer 
distress were he not a graduate. 

4.8 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

Many bankers have written me regard- 
ing the advantages and disadvantages pos- 
sessed by the college graduate in entering 
the business of banking in comparison with 
those possessed by the graduate of the high 
or grammar school. Among the great ad- 
vantages possessed by the college graduate 
alluded to by many of my gracious corre- 
spondents is the comprehensive advantage of 
a larger intellectual training and discipline. 
Mr. A. B. Hepburn, vice-president of the 
Chase National Bank of New York, says: 

" The young men who come to us later in their 
teens, after graduating from the high schools and 
grammar schools_, make excellent clerks — among the 
best we have. They are devoid of self -consciousness, 
go to the foot of the ladder unhesitatingly, are 
bright, keen, alert, and* become competent and effi- 
cient clerks. Some of them, of broader capacity and 
ambition, study their surroundings and endeavor to 
master the principles of the business as a whole in 
which they form but a cog in the wheel, and in the 
course of time develop into capable, efficient executive 
officers. 

" College graduates possess no disadvantages in 
comparison with high school or grammar school grad- 
uates as bank clerks, except perhaps the necessity 
of overcoming their sense of self-importance. Like 
all others they go to the foot of the ladder and are 

49 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

compelled to work their way up through the grind. 
Some of them seem to feel a sense of impropriety in 
being put to work alongside of boys of fifteen. The 
later work in college is considerably removed from 
the active mathematical computation and the intel- 
lectual work that bank clerks as a rule are called 
upon to perform^ so that the college graduate re- 
quires some time to become as expert in the mathe- 
matical work imposed upon him as the graduate of 
the high school, whose later years of study involve 
the very work his business calls upon him to employ. 
** These two disadvantages overcome, the ad- 
vancement of the college graduate is much more 
rapid. He is older, has learned to concentrate his 
thoughts, has a better and more efficient control over 
his intellectual faculties, has a broader and deeper 
foundation, and is bound in the end to far outstrip 
the high school graduate of equal ability and appli- 
cation. I would unhesitatingly advise any young 
man who contemplates a banking career to graduate 
from college before taking up banking if his means 
and opportunities will admit of his so doing. At fifty 
years of age he will find himself much further ad- 
vanced in the business world than he would have been 
without his college training. In the matter of con- 
tact with other men, either personally or by cor- 
respondence, a college education is invaluable. It 
opens opportunities to a man all through his business 
career, and other things being equal, his superior 
education would give him preference in the selection 
of a person for official responsibility.'* 

50 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

Mr. Seymour Dexter, president of the 
Second National Bank of Elmira, New 
York, says: 

" The college graduate will more quickly com- 
prehend the specific work he is engaged in. First, 
how should it be done; second, its relation to other 
work in the bank organism. If the work bring him 
in contact with customers of the bank, his broader 
education and experience and touch with men will 
improve the impression which he makes upon those 
with whom he comes in contact. He will more fully 
comprehend the relation of the bank and the social 
organism in which it is conducted. He will more 
readily grasp and seek to understand the whole sub- 
ject of banking, better imderstand the positions above 
him and the work to be done, and may be more rap- 
idly advanced to larger responsibilities if opportunity 
occurs. He is not liable to become the mere machine 
in the discharge of his clerical duties." 

An officer of the Union Savings Bank 
and Trust Company of Cincinnati, says: 

** When I was a boy at high school, my neighbors 
and those who took an interest in me suggested that 
I be sent to college. When the matter was brought 
before my father, he said that if I intended to fol- 
low a professional life he would urge me to do the 
same, but if it was my intention to follow a business 
life, he would not approve of it, and this impression 

51 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

was general at that time. I think, perhaps, A. T. 
Stewart, the large merchant in New York, was more 
responsible for this impression than any other one 
man at that time. It was said of him that he claimed 
the more a man knew of books the less he knew of 
business; but, after a life experience in business, I 
should say by all means have the young man go 
through college if he intends following a business life. 
I believe the future business man (and the banker 
is made of the business man) is to come out of our 
colleges, but do not understand me to say that a 
banker can be educated in a college. What you want 
to find in a banker is administrative ability, and this, 
to my mind, is best made by experience in a success- 
ful business life, but the education that a boy would 
get in college would assist him in grasping such 
knowledge as experience would give him much 
quicker, than if he did not have the college edu- 
cation." 

These extracts are examples of what 
many bankers have written me, and are in- 
terpretative and confirmatory of what I am 
trying to say, to wit, that the clerical work 
in a bank does not require for its doing a 
college education, but that the work of a 
banker, considered in its large relations, is 
vastly aided by the training which a college 
gives to responsive and responsible students. 

One may be allowed to allude to an inci- 
se 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

dental advantage which the college man in 
a bank enjoys — an advantage which is in- 
deed incidental to a degree, but one which 
in many instances proves to be of great 
worth. I refer to the acquaintances which 
are formed in and through the college. 
These acquaintances represent the choicest 
part of the community. They represent 
the men who, twenty-five years out of col- 
lege, are to be the promoters and support- 
ers of the great financial and other move- 
ments of the time. Members of the class 
of 1880 of Harvard College have carried 
forward some of the most important under- 
takings of New York and Boston, of the 
last five years. To form and to retain such 
acquaintances many a banker struggles hard 
and long. Such acquaintances belong nat- 
urally and easily to a good college man. Of 
the opportunities which they fittingly open 
he is able to avail himself. 

The disadvantages under which the 
graduate entering the banking business 
labors are chiefly three: (1) he begins his 
apprenticeship three or four years later; 
(2) he is in peril of not being wilhng to 
drudge; (3) he is liable to lack a certain me- 

53 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

chanical swiftness, or dexterity, in dealing 
with figures. To these three points I wish 
to allude. 

Of course the graduate begins three or 
four years later than the graduate of the 
high school. The high-school graduate en- 
ters the bank at the age of eighteen, the col- 
lege graduate at the age of twenty-two. 
But it is to be said at once that the college 
man soon overtakes and soon passes the 
high-school man. Of course it is presumed 
that the two are of equal ability. Of course, 
too, it is to be recognized that there are men, 
having a college education, who have less 
intellectual power than high-school men not 
having a college education. A college does 
not make brains; it is supposed only to im- 
prove brains already made. But the argu- 
ment is clear and sohd that, in case the col- 
lege man has as great intellectual ability as 
the high-school man, he will soon make up 
for lack of experience, experience which the 
high-school boy has gained, and having 
made up for this lack, he will soon go ahead 
of him, and will continue going ahead of 
him by constantly increasing lengths. He 
is able to put a better-trained brain into his 

54) 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

work. He is able to foresee and to see. 
He is able to do certain things without ever 
having learned to do them. As two of my 
correspondents remark; 

" The college graduate ought to have a mental 
training that would enable him more readily to com- 
prehend the more difficult questions liable to be pre- 
sented. He ought to learn more quickly the details 
of the work from his habits of study. His larger 
experience with men and the self-dependence ac- 
quired at a large institution ought to give him more 
confidence in transacting business with the public. 
A college man has lived in a little world, has sharp- 
ened his witSj has had the stimulus of competition, 
has learned to use his faculties, knows something of 
his relative ability, and ought to outstrip the high 
school boy." 

" The mass of bank clerks have had few advan- 
tages, they gradually and painfully acquire profi- 
ciency which would come more quickly to the man 
who had learned to use his brain to the best advan- 
tage. With equal capacity and industry, I should 
say the college man in five years would outstrip the 
high school boy with his three or four years' ex- 
perience." 

The objection is further made that the 
college graduate is unwilling to drudge. 
He feels himself, it is said, above the duty 

55 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

of beginning to climb at the bottom of the 
ladder. Of the age of twenty-two, bearing 
an academic degree, he is not willing to do 
these simple duties or hmnble tasks which 
the high-school boy of eighteen may delight 
to do. Of course there are college men of 
this sort. One, however, hears of them a 
great deal of tener than one meets them. I 
believe their number is vastly exaggerated. 
The college trains the student to do what- 
ever he is called to do. The record of the 
college men who entered the army, in both 
the great civil war and the Spanish, proves 
not only that no men were more brave on 
the firing line, but also that no men were 
more faithful in doing the drudgeries of 
camp duties than the college men. If it is 
fitting for the graduate to sweep the bank, 
he will sweep it, and sweep it better and 
quicker than the ordinary man. I know a 
former Harvard student of high rank who 
through ill health has become a hedger and a 
ditcher. He tells me he can dig ditches far 
better by reason of his college training. I 
know of a Yale graduate who is working as 
a section-hand on the Pennsylvania Rail- 
road. But he will not work there long. The 

56 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

charge so often made against the college 
man that he is not willing to drudge is essen- 
tially a false one. The college man is will- 
ing to do whatever is his duty. 

The third disadvantage under which 
the college graduate labors is the inability 
to attend to certain arithmetical or semi- 
mechanical processes with the dexterit}^ of 
the high-school boy. Mr. L. V. F. Ran- 
dolph, president of the Atlantic Trust Com- 
pany of New York, and who has for fifty 
years been engaged in banking, writes, 
saying : 

** I have noticed that the average high school boy 
is able to spell and write about as well as the college 
graduate; that his figures are as plain, and that his 
accuracy of computation is as satisfactory. It may 
almost be said to hold good that, within certain limits, 
the younger a boy applies himself to figures the bet- 
ter he does with them; and I have found youngsters 
from the high school quite as apt at the composition 
of business letters as college graduates. This might 
not hold good as a rule; but I fear that there are 
so many cases in which no positive advance in such 
knowledge as is useful in banking is made at college, 
that the general argument would be in favor of tak- 
ing the apprentice in banking at an earlier age, and 
giving up the college course." 

5 57 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

This disadvantage the college graduate 
does labor under. He may, of course, over- 
come it, at least somewhat. But one may 
as well confess that the college does not aim 
at making good computers. 

The worth, therefore, of a college edu- 
cation to most men, who propose to become 
bankers of large relations, seems to be evi- 
dent, provided that conditions be fairly 
favorable. Among these conditions is one, 
which several of my correspondents name, 
of peculiar significance — the cost of an edu- 
cation should not be made too great. Many 
families give themselves distress through ex- 
cessive economies in order to educate a son. 
The son who is willing to accept of an edu- 
cation under such conditions proves himself 
to be unworthy of an education. He should 
work his way largely or entirely through 
college. The boy who lets his mother pay 
for his cigars by taking in washing, or even 
the boy who lets his mother pay his fees for 
instruction by taking in washing, does not 
hold out promise of becoming a useful 
banker or a good laundrjrman himself. The 
Treasurer of the United States writes me, 
saying : 

58 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

" I have seen a father scrimped in his comforts, 
a mother and sisters toiling early and late to the peril 
of their healthy to send a favorite son and brother 
to college, with the result of pampering him and 
weakening his self-reliance and sturdiness." 

Unless the boy, the son of a family of 
great poverty, can go through college with- 
out laying a burden on the family, he had 
usually better not go. But thankfully be it 
said, he can go through without laying this 
burden, in case he be worthy of an education. 

This discussion I wish to close by making 
long extracts from two letters written by 
two conspicuous men: one the president of 
the First National Bank of Chicago, and 
the other by the Treasurer of the United 
States. Mr. Jas. B. Forgan, of Chicago, 
says: 

** In answer to your first question, * What are (a) 
the advantages, (b) the disadvantages, possessed by 
a college graduate in entering the banking business, 
over those possessed by a graduate of the high school 
or grammar school ? ' my answer would be that I do 
not know of any advantages that the college grad- 
uate would have over the high school graduate, nor 
do I know of any disadvantages, except that he 
would be starting in his business career later in life 
and would have to do the drudgery of an office-boy 

59 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

after he had acquired an education that might lead 
him to consider himself above work of this kind. 1 
am not a college graduate myself and can not there- 
fore say what effect a college education might have 
had on my business career. I had a good high school 
education, which qualified me for entering college 
had I desired to do so. I have never felt that my 
education has been deficient for anything required of 
me in my business career. My experience with those 
who have come into the bank under me after having 
had a college education leads me to believe that they 
learned nothing that was of any special benefit to 
them in their business career from their college 
course. ... I think that the elementary edu- 
cation obtained in the primary and high schools of this 
country is deficient in grounding the pupils in wri- 
ting, arithmetic, grammar, spelling, and composition. 
I think the colleges, if they were to give special at- 
tention to it, might in a two years' course give a 
young man an education after he has graduated from 
the high school along lines that would be of special 
benefit to him in a business career, but so far as I 
know none of them have yet made this departure 
from the beaten track of classical education. . . . 

" A man has ample time and opportunity in con- 
nection with his business career to develop his mind 
along educational lines such as suit his fancy and 
such as are not absolutely necicssary in his business, 
so that if his career in life is to be that of a business 
man, he had better get to work as soon as he has 
got the groundwork of an education that will enable 

60 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

him to do so^ and develop his mind by study along 
lines of literature, art, or the classics during liis 
leisure hours as a pastime." 

Mr. Ellis H. Roberts says: 

** You present the man as already decided to 
enter the banking service, and ask what advantage 
for such an occupation a college training will confer 
upon him, and what disadvantages he will suffer in 
consequence of it. The delay in entering upon his 
chosen vocation, and in earning a salary, is in my 
opinion the chief factor on the negative side; but 
there is also a tendency on the part of college-bred 
youths to shirk the drudgery of the details essential 
to the discipline of the thorough banker. These are 
real disadvantages. 

" They seem to me more than counterbalanced by 
the broadening influences of college studies and the 
mental culture which rightly used develops powers 
of analysis, investigation, and judgment. The col- 
lege graduate who will not do the work at hand, 
will be worth little; the conceit which may set him 
above the details of his trade is personal and not 
chargeable to his education. He must know that his 
classmate who went into the bank when he started 
to college is three or four years ahead of him in 
the office routine; he ought to be even more in ad- 
vance in power of thought and knowledge of prin- 
ciples and grasp of the forces which control indi- 
viduals and society. The youth who goes to the 
bank from the high school will the sooner be eligible 

61 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

to become a teller; he who brings to the bank the 
discipline and knowledge and culture of a college 
ought the sooner to be fitted to become chief of a 
division, and cashier, and general manager. 

" But the personal equation can not be neglected. 
Whatever their education and training, some men can 
never rise above the counters and the journals and 
the ledgers, while others will master the larger tasks 
of administration and credit, of exchange and cur- 
rency, of loans and investments. 

** With the limitations thus hinted at, a friend 
may well advise a boy of eighteen, of intellectual 
habits, of apparently efficient administrative abil- 
ities, to go to college from a high school, rather than 
to enter the banking business at once. 

" Yet we must recognize the conspicuous fact that 
very many of the bankers most successful, certainly 
in the routine of their profession, are not college 
graduates. Nevertheless, although generals have 
been developed without the benefits of military 
schools, all nations act on the theory that education, 
broad and generous, is the surest condition of the 
highest usefulness in the most trying fields. The 
best banker, measured by the noblest standard, will 
be the man who with the amplest capacities has them 
best disciplined, and fostered by varied culture, and 
who can thus look through and all around the most 
difficult problems." 

The question which has heen discussed 
has had relation to the college graduate be- 

62 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

coming a banker. It has no relation to the 
larger question of his relations as a citizen. 
It has no relation to the range of his 
own enjoyments or to the development of 
his own personal character. Those personal 
and larger relations are, of course, most sig- 
nificant and essential. In these respects, I 
suppose, no one can question for a moment 
that the college, whether it does or does not 
aid a man in making a living through bank- 
ing, does aid him in making a large life for 
himself and for the community. 



63 



Ill 

IN TRANSPORTATION 



65 



IN TRANSPORTATION 

I SUPPOSE that in all the current discus- 
sion regarding the function of the college 
no one questions but that the college educa- 
tion does aid one in being or becoming a 
gentleman. I suppose, also, that usually 
it is granted that a college education does 
aid one in being or becoming an efficient 
member of society. The exceptions to 
these two principles are so infrequent that 
one may eliminate them from the discussion 
regarding the worth of the college. But 
the general advantages which are supposed 
to accrue through a college education do 
not touch, in the view of certain good and 
wise persons, the fundamental question of 
the advantages or disadvantages possessed 
by the college graduate who enters business 
as a life career. Touching the question of 
the worth or the worthlessness of a college 
course as a preparation for business, no more 
vital method of discussion can be arrived at 

67 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

than one which shall make an appeal to the 
question of railroad service. For the rail- 
road service is the largest field of the em- 
ployment of labor, and also it represents and 
unites several diverse kinds of labor, as 
financial, executive, legal, and mechanical. 
It is not to be denied that there are dis- 
advantages placed upon those who enter the 
railroad service after the completion of a 
college course. One of these disadvantages 
arises from the environment which the col- 
lege is supposed to represent. The college 
represents to most men an atmosphere of 
leisure, of wealth, and frequently of the 
extravagant, unwise use of wealth. These 
disadvantages, of course, touch those enter- 
ing any form of service as well as those en- 
tering the railroad. The general manager 
of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Rail- 
way Company says: 

** Unfortunately a majority of the young men 
who pass through college are financially able to live 
on a scale which they can not hope to do in railroad 
service and are apt to contract expensive habits, and 
few of them are willing thereafter to begin railroad 
work at the very bottom, or if they do^ find the work 
too irksome and do not persevere therein. This, in 

68 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

my judgment, is the principal reason why so many 
prominent railway officials come from boys of mod- 
erate education and particularly from boys who 
begin the work while very young." 

The more obvious disadvantage springs 
from the time, later by four years, at which 
one is able to begin the railroad service. 
These disadvantages are direct, positive, and 
plain as the alphabet. 

" If he desires to enter railroad work, and is 
eighteen years of age^ he won't have time to go to 
college if he desires and expects to reach the top 
before he dies. Consider that it takes an average of 
over thirty years' actual service to make a railroad 
president, which, of course, is considered the top of 
the ladder, so no time is to be wasted if the top is 
to be attained." 

Thus writes the general manager of the 
Boston & Albany Railroad. The president 
of the Ann Arbor Railroad says : 

** The college graduate is at a disadvantage com- 
pared with the graduate of the high school and the 
grammar school for this reason^ that he has usually 
spent from three to five years of his life at college 
and consequently is that much older and has less 
opportunity of improving himself in the branches 

69 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

that would fit him for railroading or any other com- 
mercial business/' 

The president and general manager of 
another road says : 

** Should the high school graduate, however, enter 
the service directly after graduation he would have 
at least four years' advantage in practical experience 
at the time the college graduate would enter the serv- 
ice, and in my judgment the college graduate would 
not be equal to the high school graduate until he had 
at least five years* practical experience." 

The disadvantages arising from the later 
time of entering the railroad service is at 
once to be recognized. Apparently the 
man who enters the railroad service requires 
five years to catch up with the high-school 
graduate who entered the same service four 
years before. When the high-school gradu- 
ate has been working on the railroad nine 
years and the college graduate five they 
would be relatively at the same point of 
attainment, provided that they were of 
equal ability, and were possessed of equal 
opportunities. 

A third disadvantage one should not 
pass over, and this lies in that condition of 

70 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

human nature which is inclined to depre- 
ciate advantages richer than those which 
oneself enjoys. Prejudice does exist still 
among many railroad people against the 
college graduate. Lessening of prejudice 
is going on, but it is not yet wholly ehmi- 
nated. Uneducated, surly officers and fel- 
low workmen are not disinclined to make 
the condition of the college graduate harder 
than it ought to be made. This interpreta- 
tion I get not, of course, out of my own 
experience, but I am simply repeating the 
testimony of railroad men themselves. 

A fourth disadvantage should not be 
omitted. This disadvantage lies in the 
arrogance and cockeyism of certain college 
men. One of course emphasizes the word 
certain, for cockeyism or arrogance is not 
the prevailing characteristic of college men, 
any more than it is the prevailing character- 
istic of humanity itself. But some college 
men are cockey. The general manager of 
the Grand Trunk Railway system says: 

"A college education, I believe, leads a young 
man, on entering railroad service, to think that he 
^ knows it all'; of course, theoretically, he may, but 
any one that has such an idea rarely succeeds, as the 

71 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

practical knowledge of all branches of railroad work 
is far more valuable than theory.'* 

College men are usually willing to begin 
at the bottom of the ladder and climb up 
step by step if this be their function. I 
know of a graduate of Harvard College 
who wished to learn the business of making 
steel. He, with other men, was directed to 
shovel coal into the boiler furnaces. His 
pay was larger than was usually given for 
work of the sort. At the time he received 
his first month's pay, he was asked how he 
liked his job. " I have nothing to complain 
of," he remarked, " but I wish to ask you 
one question — ^why is it necessary for me to 
keep shoveling coal in order to make steel? " 
" For you to learn the business of making 
steel you must learn how coal behaves when 
it is in the fire ; you can in no v/ay learn how 
coal behaves so well as by shoveling coal into 
the furnace." 

The typical college man is willing to 
shovel, if shoveling be his function. 

These four disadvantages which I name, 
soft environment, time, prejudice of officers 
and workmen, and arrogance in oneself, are 

72 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

disadvantages touching more or less strongly 
the college graduate who enters the railroad 
service. The summing up of the advan- 
tages and disadvantages is very well made 
by the general passenger agent of the Min- 
neapolis & St. Louis Railroad: 

" At the present time civil service rules are so 
generally observed, except perhaps in the profes- 
sional branches of railroad service, such as the legal, 
medical, and engineering departments, that it is 
usually quite difficult for a young man to get an 
opening except in the lowest grades, consequently 
the boy who begins with a high school education at, 
say, seventeen, will by the time he is twenty-three 
be much further advanced than the young man of 
twenty-three, who entered on leaving college at 
twenty-one, and if we allow that they are of equal 
mental and business capacity the boy who started at 
seventeen will always remain in advance, hence it 
seems fair to conclude that the four years between 
seventeen and twenty-one will prove to have been 
more profitably spent in gaining experience in the 
rudiments of the business than at college. The ob- 
servation applies to boys who are depending solely 
on their own merits for advancement. Where suffi- 
cient influence can be commanded to effect an en- 
trance above the lower grades of service, in my 
opinion the time and money spent in obtaining a 
college education will prove to have been well in- 
6 73 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

vested. The men who have made the greatest suc- 
cesses in the railroad field have generally been men 
without much schooling, but with great capacity for 
the absorption of knowledge, tireless workers, honest, 
faithful, and efficient in the discharge of their duties, 
men who would make themselves felt anywhere, not 
born into the railroad business, but getting there by 
chance, have improved every opportunity, and over- 
come every obstacle, rising by sheer force of ability 
to a point where they attract the notice of the man- 
agement and then later of the capitalists, who are 
always in search of tried men in whom to repose con- 
fidence and responsibility. And this vantage-ground 
once gained, the pathway to greater honors is much 
easier. After all, it is the man and not the years 
spent at school that tells, and perhaps in the class 
referred to the struggle of obtaining an education by 
reading and by observation while performing their 
daily work is just the kind of exercise best cal- 
culated to develop the remarkable characteristics 
which they bear. Many doubtless fail because of 
lack of school education who either do not possess 
the physical strength or the disposition to make the 
close application necessary to acquire it by them- 
selves. I have known many worthy boys who re- 
mained stationary simply because their learning was 
so deficient that they could not be advanced without 
detriment to the service or injustice to themselves." 

I now wish to present a few out of many 
testimonies given me affirming that a col- 

.74< 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

lege education is of advantage, and usually 
of great advantage, to one who purposes to 
become a railroad man. A principal officer 
of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Kail- 
way says: 

** On the whple^ I would advise a boy of eighteen 
to take a college course before entering railroad 
work, provided he feels satisfied that he will still be 
willing to commence at the lowest round of the lad- 
der and persevere in the work as thoroughly as he 
would have done had he commenced it four years 
earlier. He must make up his mind that he will 
have to put in years of hard work, a portion of the 
time in a very menial position, before he can aspire 
to a prominent position." 

The president of the Lehigh Valley 
Railroad says: 

** Railroad work, as all other work of a similar 
character, has reached that point in its development 
where the man who has the best trained mind, other 
things being equal, has the greatest chances for suc- 
cess. If a boy is so situated in life that he can con- 
tinue his studies after graduating at a high school, 
by taking a course through college, it will be de- 
cidedly to his advantage in the end. What seems to 
be needed at this time in young men who decide to 
follow railroad work as their career, is not so much 
any special knowledge as it is a thoroughly well- 

75 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

trained mind, which will place them in a position 
where, through their subsequent experience, they 
can assimilate knowledge and ultimately be capable 
of producing correct results.'* 

An officer of the Southern Railway 
Company says: 

" I am a stanch believer in education in its 
broadest sense, and I would infinitely rather have 
any young man in whom I am interested possessed 
of a college education and thrown upon his own re- 
sources at that time, than to have him start on his 
life's work earlier and with a small capital at his 
command which, being controlled by one without ex- 
perience, might be easily lost and not available when 
there has been acquired the experience to properly 
control it. The boy himself will, I think, discover 
the wisdom of this later on. One of the strongest 
arguments, I think, in favor of a college education 
for a young man is the fact that most, if not all, 
successful business or professional men who have 
themselves been deprived of the advantages of a col- 
lege education insist upon their own sons enjoying 
the advantages which were denied to them, and recom- 
mend strongly the same course to any young man in 
whom they have an interest. As your inquiry refers 
to the material side only, I have refrained from 
speaking of the subject in a larger sense, that is, 
having reference to the many advantages that are 
incident to a college education in the development of 
refined and cultured tendencies, the love of reading 

76 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

and the higher things of life generally, as well as 
the development of the capacity to enjoy and to be 
resourceful, and the entering into friendships which 
are life-lasting and invaluable." 

The president of the Michigan Central 
Railroad says: 

** The transportation business of this country is 
becoming more and more every year an exact science, 
and the advantages of a college education in disci- 
plining and developing the mind can not be overesti- 
mated. I believe that in the future, as a rule, the 
managers of the different railroads in this country 
will prefer to employ young men who have obtained 
a thorough collegiate education, rather than those who 
have not gone beyond the limit of a grammar or a 
high school. 

** My advice to a young man who desires to enter 
the railroad service would be, after he had finished 
his course at a high school, to take a course of three 
or four years at some scientific college, and while 
this would seem to put off the day when he would 
enter the railroad service, I am satisfied that in the 
end, all other things being equal, he will rise to a 
higher plane than if he had not obtained such an 
education." 

A vice-president of the Chesapeake & 
Ohio Railway says : 

" The years of mental training that the college 
graduate has secured will enable him to accomplish 

77 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

more in a shorter time than is possible for the young 
man who has not had these advantages; and every- 
thing els-e being equal, I think that the college grad- 
uate in the end vrill be more successful in any class 
of business than the young man who enters service 
after a common or high school education." 

The same officer of the Chesapeake & 
Ohio Railway adds: 

** The ichief officers of a railway company need 
the training and the perfect command of the action 
of the mind which a collegiate course is supposed to, 
and I believe does^ afford. They must be able to deal 
with and contend with the best trained intellects in 
the country, and to do this it is proper that they should 
have all the advantages of a complete education. I 
therefore think that any boy aspiring to a chief posi- 
tion in a railroad should go to college if he can; it 
will help him. Many can not go, and still by strenu- 
ous effort reach high places, but in such instances they 
have a full realization of the difficulties they have 
contended with.'* 

The president of the Wabash Railroad 
says: 

** To enter any of the other departments, a col- 
lege education is not necessary, but if the young 
man has the right sort of material in him, he will be 
advanced, and as he reaches the higher positions he 
will find that his college training, if he has had the 
advantage of it, will be of great benefit to him. On 

78 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

the wholcj I am decidedly of the opinion that a man 
with a college education has the advantage of one 
without, not only in the railroad service but in any 
walk of life, and socially as well, and I would say 
to any young man that if he has an opportunity to 
secure a college education, he should take advantage 
of it, no matter whether he expects to become a rail- 
roader, to enter one of the professions, or to adopt 
a mercantile career." 

These statements which I quote at 
length, and other statements which I should 
be glad to print, express or intimate certain 
principles or elements of character. One of 
these elements refers to the being and power 
of the boy himself. One might say all 
depends upon the kind of boy who goes to 
college; all depends also upon the kind of 
boy who enters the railroad service. The 
general superintendent of the Fort Worth 
& Denver City Railway Company says: 

" Primarily it can be stated that whether or not 
a college education would be of any assistance to a 
young man would depend largely upon himself. In 
railroad business, in almost any department, there is 
undoubtedly room for young men of good education, 
but with it they must have a desire for the class of 
work they have selected, or rather the work that is 
found in the department to which they have gone, 

79 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

and a willingness to start at the bottom of the ladder 
and perform what might appear to them to be un- 
important duties with the same degree of care as 
would be exercised in the higher branches. Railroad 
business requires assiduous application on the part of 
the employee, and success will depend largely on how 
well he may do his work, his ability for organization 
and administrative capacity, and to master the details 
of the work assigned. In the mechanical and en- 
gineering departments, a great many technical ques- 
tions come up that could be quickly solved by a young 
man with a college education if he had applied him- 
self in that direction. A college education perhaps 
is not essential to one's success in the railroad busi- 
ness; but any man possessing the same, with oppor- 
tunities to succeed in railroad business, would, I con- 
sider, be doubly equipped." 

Mr. Marvin Hughitt, president of the 
Chicago & Northwestern Railway Com- 
pany, says: 

** Whether it be to the disadvantage of a young 
man to devote the time necessary in obtaining a col- 
legiate education, in preference to going at once into 
railroad or other work, depends to a very great de- 
gree, if not wholly, upon the * make-up ' of the young 
man. And in the consideration of the advisability of 
the one course or the other, this question of the kind 
of 'timber' a young man may be becomes a most 
important factor, in my judgment, in reaching a con- 

80 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

elusion, considered both with regard to his school 
life and to his discharge of the duties pertaining to 
whatever line of work he may undertake; for one 
young man's mental equipment may be such, as com- 
pared with his fellow-worker, that when he has fin- 
ished grammer or high school he will have reached 
a point in mental discipline and training that many 
of his co-workers can only hope to reach at the end 
of a thorough college course," 

One boy is better fitted to take up life 
and work on his graduation at the high 
school than is another boy on his graduation 
at college. Much depends not only on edu- 
cated power, but also on the morale of the 
boy himself. His regard for the cardinal 
virtues has as great value as his respect for 
the cardinal verities. Moral honesty is as 
important as intellectual honesty. The love 
and practise of justice is more elemental 
than a sound intellectual interpretation of 
the origin and nature of justice. One boy 
who never goes to college may, by reason of 
his intellectual and ethical power, reach a 
far higher place than one who does go. 
Nature did for the one who finished his edu- 
cation with the high school more than both 
nature and the college did for the other. 

81 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

But of course the proper method is not to 
compare man with man, but to compare 
man with himself. The question is not 
whether a college education will make one 
man more efficient than another man, but 
whether it will make any man more efficient 
than he would be without a college educa- 
tion. 

In these remarks, too, is found a certain 
general inference to the effect that the value 
of education lies in the securing of a trained 
mind. I may be suffered again to say that 
a trained mind is a mind trained to think. 
The railroad presidents, and managers, and 
superintendents who are most valuable are 
the men who can think. One of the railroad 
managers of the Northwest had a somewhat 
unique experience. The railroad of which 
he was superintendent was sold. The pur- 
chaser visited him in his office. He found 
him before a desk covered with papers, wri- 
ting or signing letters. The purchaser re- 
marked, " Mr. W , you and I will not 

get on together." "Why, sir?" "Be- 
cause you are so busy with your correspond- 
ence that you have no time to give to me. 
I don't want a man writing letters or sign- 

82 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

ing them about ordinary business. For 
labor of that sort I can get a man for a thou- 
sand dollars. I want you to be free from 
this business and spend your time thinking 
about improving the efficiency of this rail- 
road." The superintendent took the hint. 
The next time the owner of the road came to 
see him he was in his office, his desk clear 
of papers, apparently doing nothing, but 
really doing much and most. The power 
which the great railroad men of this country 
possess is that power which the railroad sys- 
tem of this country opens every opportunity 
for using, the power of thinking. Be it said 
that this is the power which the American 
college is ordained to develop. 

An important question emerges at this 
point. Should the education which the rail- 
road man is to receive be a general college 
education or a technical one? This question 
is part of a still broader question whether 
a man should enter into his study prepara- 
tory for his profession imimediately upon the 
close of his high-school or academy course. 
The lawyer, the minister, the doctor pursues 
his professional study after his college 
course. The engineer, in all the various lines 

83 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

of engineering, usually makes his under- 
graduate course and his professional course 
identical. The technical school is supposed 
to take the place of both the liberal and the 
professional course. In general, if a man 
can afford the time, I am sure it is well for 
him to take up his technical course after his 
course in liberal education. But the expense 
in ^ both time and money is great. Without 
entering into a discussion of the question, 
I am confident that it is best for a man pro- 
posing to enter the railroad service to enter 
the regular college; but while pursuing his 
course in the regular college to give to this 
course a scientific or technical relation. Let 
him, for instance, make a special study of 
physics, chemistry, geology, economics, and 
sociology. Such studies pursued in a col- 
lege of liberal arts and sciences will prove 
to be at once liberalizing and also sufiiciently 
professional. 

The history of the administration of rail- 
roads of the United States is the history of 
a development. In the beginning the man- 
agement of railroads was committed to their 
owners. This form of administration gave 
way presently, and administration was car- 

84 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

ried on by those who had been trained in ac- 
tual service. At the time of this form of 
administration legislators aroused them- 
selves to the problems touching the public 
wealth which the railroad had created. 
Strikes also arose and resulted in the de- 
struction of valuable railroad property. 
For meeting such conditions practical men 
had little or no knowledge. There arose a 
demand for men who could take a large view 
of the problems presented by the railroad 
service, and who could do much, through 
their power, for the solving of these prob- 
lems. At this period of the development the 
college man was called into the service. 

There can be no doubt, I think, that the 
problems created by the American railroad 
are increasing in number and difficulty. The 
need, therefore, of the properly and nobly 
trained mind in the solving of these prob- 
lems is to become yet more and more urgent. 
Mr. Frank Trumbull, president of the Colo- 
rado road, says: 

" In my opinion the time is near at hand when the 
untrained boy, with moderate capital, will have a 
smaller relative chance for success, and the scientific- 
ally trained young man will be more in demand than 

85 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

ever before in the world's history; this because of the 
natural growth of combinations of capital and labor, 
and the impossibility of manufacturing or monopoliz- 
ing brains." 

The great need of the trained brain in 
the railroad service in the near future is also 
nobly expressed by one whose name I am 
not at liberty to indicate, but which would 
be at once recognized as standing for one 
of the most efficient and ablest of the mana- 
gers of the great railroad systems. In 
answer to my question he quotes to me a 
letter addressed to the principal of an acad- 
emy in New England in which his son, a boy 
of fourteen, is a student : 

'' My own feeling is that as the control of large 
properties comes to involve more and more technical 
information, makes larger drafts on capacity for 
organization, and to be handled not in the process 
of evolution, as the present managers have come to 
them, but as a going business — as they must be dealt 
with in the future — ^they can only be handled, in 
the main, by people who have had a thorough train- 
ing and liberal education. However, I predicate this 
upon these men being able to begin their actual work 
at an age when the mind is still plastic and habits 
subject to change. If a man is not to engage in 
actual work until he is twenty-four, it would doubtless 

86 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

be better for him to forego altogether the college 
education and begin his work at sixteen. I am 
strongly of the opinion that the colleges of to-day 
are inflicting a very great injury upon their grad- 
uates by insisting upon a course of study that re- 
tains them far too long at their books. It is from 
this point of view that I would consider the loss of 

a year to as very serious indeed^ and one 

that I would go to a very great deal of inconvenience 
and some expense to avoid. What I have to look to 
is not his marks next year^ but the training of his mind 
and the general acquisition of knowledge during the 
next six or seven years. If^ on the whole, he attains 
a fair average, and has the benefit of the association 
that comes with that training, I should be quite satis- 
fied. What I have in mind is not that he shall * reach 
prematurely any coveted rank/ but that he should, 
as rapidly as is possible and consistent with the 
proper training of his mind, pass through the period 
of study that he has before him." 

The significant phrase in this most sig- 
nificant letter is the phrase " going busi- 
ness." Men in the future will take up rail- 
roading as it is carried on in vast relations 
and with vast forces involved. For entering 
into such undertakings only men of great 
power and with trained ability to think can 
hope to attain to the opportunity of render- 
ing large service. Their fathers and their 

87 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

grandfathers entered into the railroad busi- 
ness while the business was small. They 
grew in power as the railroad grew in busi- 
ness; the railroad grew in business as they 
grew in power. At the present time and 
in the future this method no longer prevails. 
Men step into this service, as this service 
itself is progressing, under most complex 
conditions. No power is too powerful; no 
brain too intelligent; no vision too clear; no 
executive skill too great to be received into 
this service. 

In training men, therefore, for the rail- 
road or other business the university should 
seek to secure results which are embodied in 
men having these primary and fundamental 
characteristics : first, the man of sound phys- 
ical health; second, the man of noble moral 
character; third, the man who is a gentle- 
man ; fourth, the man who, having an educa- 
tion, is able to weigh evidence, to observe, to 
compare, to infer, to think ; fifth, the man of 
special education, able to apply his general 
power of thinking to the solution of prob- 
lems immediately presented in and by his 
vocation; and, sixth, the man who, having 
all these powers and finding himself face to 

88 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

face with opportunities, is willing through 
hard, diligent, noble work to apply his abili- 
ties in doing the duty which the opportuni- 
ties lay upon him. 



89 



IV 
IN INSURANCE 



91 



IN INSURANCE 

If insurance be regarded as a business, 
it has become the broadest business, for it 
touches all relations of life. If insurance be 
regarded as a profession, it has become a 
most important and serious one, for its prob- 
lems are the most intricate. 

The two earlier and more important 
forms of insurance, fire and life, are still the 
most important. The amount of money di- 
rectly and indirectly invested in them is 
larger than the amount invested in any other 
form of human interest. But insurance has 
gone far beyond covering the risks of fire 
and of death. What can not we insure these 
days? To tell what we can not insure were 
almost easier to tell than what we can. One 
insures his steam-boiler against blowing up, 
his plate-glass windows against breaking, 
his house against robbers, his person against 
accidents, his honor and honesty and that of 
his clerks against embezzlement. The so- 

96 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

cializing of society has gone farther and 
deeper in insurance than in any other human 
process or product. 

The field of insurance is, therefore, a 
good field in which to apply two great ques- 
tions regarding the value of college educa- 
tion. These questions are: 

1. What are the advantages and the dis- 
advantages which belong to a college gradu- 
ate entering the insurance business? 

2. Should a boy of eighteen, of good in- 
tellectual parts, the graduate of a high 
school, who intends to enter the insurance 
business be advised first to go to college? 

These questions I have asked of about 
a hundred of the chief officers of the prin- 
cipal insurance companies in the United 
States. 

Of the replies received thirty-eight have 
value more or less worthy for the present 
discussion. Of these thirty-eight, be it at 
once said, twenty-six affirm that a college 
education should be taken by one preparing 
to enter the insurance business, eight affirm 
that a college education should not on the 
whole be taken, and four are in doubt. The 
larger part of those answering are not them- 

94 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

selves graduates, although several are, and 
these several usually of Yale. 

In dealing with the diverse interpreta- 
tions which are thus made I can not do 
better than present extracts from the letters 
themselves. For the letters are impressive 
in the liberal and large views taken and in 
the careful analysis made. First I shall 
quote largely from a letter of Mr. John T. 
Stone, president of the Maryland Casualty 
Company, which deals with the intricacy of 
the problems presented in one form of insur- 
ance as well as with more general concerns. 
Mr. Stone's letter is as follows: 

*' Barring such employments as chemist in manu- 
facturing establishments, metallurgists in mining or 
smelting works, and similar occupations, in which a 
college or university education is prerequisite, I be- 
lieve the insurance business calls for a broader train- 
ing, or at least oiFers better returns to such training, 
than any other line of business. 

" Perhaps I had better say right here that all 
these remarks relate to those branches of insurance 
known as the casualty lines and with which I am 
familiar; while of the other lines — fire, life, and 
marine — I know comparatively nothing and do not 
pretend to speak. 

" In the business of casualty insurance there is 

95 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

room, nay necessity, for the exercise of the very best 
powers of analytical reasoning and for the applica- 
tion of the broadest information in almost every 
sphere of knowledge. It is a business that has to 
do with all other lines of business — manufactures, 
mines, lumbering, transportation, commerce — and all 
in an intimate and technical manner. Moreover, 
some knowledge of law and of the human body is 
of vast usefulness in it. 

*' As to your first question, I would dismiss it, 
so far as it refers to a grammar school education, 
with a word. No matter what calling a lad may 
wish or be destined to follow, it is, I take it, a great 
pity to stop his mental training at the grammar 
school. When that is done he enters life as heavily 
handicapped mentally as the prematurely born infant 
enters it physically. They may both survive and 
splendidly succeed, but the odds are heavily against 
them, and their success is in spite of their start .and 
not because of it. 

" The high school graduate is very differently 
circumstanced. He is four years older. Those four 
years have introduced him to the Latin, Greek, and 
probably French and German languages. The 
structure and literature of his own tongue have been 
studied to some extent. The higher mathematics 
has trained him to some degree in orderly, analyt- 
ical thinking. He has made some acquaintance with 
the sciences of physics, chemistry, and physiology. 
His intellect has received an impulse and direction 
toward mental maturity sufficiently continuous and 

96 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

steady to warrant the expectation that he will keep 
up the trend of his own choice and effort. He has 
been at school for^ say, eleven or twelve years. He 
begins to feel the ambition, and desires the self-sup- 
porting independence, of manhood. Yet he is young 
enough to accept without humiliation the lowly posi- 
tion of office-boy at which almost every entrant upon 
insurance career must start, and to perform its ap- 
parently trifling, yet really important and educa- 
tional, duties without any sense of discomfort or of 
lowered dignity. And he is young enough to spend 
the usually unavoidable years of climbing and wait- 
ing for the successive promotions that lead to the 
top, and to reach somewhere near that coveted posi- 
tion before he is too old to enjoy it. 

" What advantages will he secure, for an insur- 
ance career, if instead of going from the high school 
into an insurance office, he first goes through college? 
His introduction to the languages, dead and living, 
his own and foreign, will ripen into a familiar ac- 
quaintance with their literatures, enriching his mind, 
storing his memory, refining his taste, increasing his 
facility of oral and written expression. 

" He will become capable of reducing a problem 
to its lowest terms, its last analysis, by reason of the 
added years spent in the difficulties and intricacies 
of advanced mathematical studies. His knowledge 
of natural science, while not yet that of the post- 
graduate specialist, will be reasonably complete. 

" Of what use are these things in the insurance 
business } 

97 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

" Again reminding you that I speak of my own 
branch — casualty insurance — I reply, of the greatest 
practical use, of real working value, of themselves. 
Perhaps of even greater service in so fixing the habit 
and maturing the power of steady, intelligent appli- 
cation, that he who has had those added years of col- 
lege training will, because of them, bring to the serv- 
ice of his employer, a capability of dealing with the 
questions of underwriting that must compel recog- 
nition and reward. 

" But what of his age } That may be and often 
is a disadvantage at the start. The college graduate 
must begin, like all other beginners, at the beginning, 
usually. And he is no longer a boy. He is a man 
of twenty-two or more. It is disagreeable after the 
manliness of college athletics, the atmosphere of col- 
lege society, the free and equal mingling with con- 
genial spirits in the intellectual life of the upper 
school, to be ' an office boy,' to take orders from other 
clerks who may be younger in years and inferior in 
education, or from an employer who may be very 
slow to believe that much business utility can be had 
of a college man ! Besides, there is always the possi- 
bility of over-education, or intellectual snobbishness. 
The objections first urged will be only temporary. If 
there be common sense, and a manly, cheerful, teach- 
able doing of the lowly routine duties of the first 
round of the business ladder, and if the young man 
has really profited by his college education, he will 
force recognition and promotion by sheer merit and 
that right soon. The four years* advantage in the 

98 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

start possessed by the high school boy, assuming equal 
natural ability and adaptability, will be more than 
overcome by the better training and equipment of 
the college man. In this opinion it is important to 
note the qualifying assumption. There must be a 
business instinct, the element of commercial horse- 
sense, without which the college man will fail in any 
business, and with which even the grammar school 
boy is apt to succeed. 

** I believe I have, to all intents^ answered your 
second question in the foregoing. But to be ex- 
plicit I would say that — given an aptitude for busi- 
ness — I would advise such a boy as you describe in 
it to go to college if he proposes becoming an in- 
surance man, especially a casualty insurance man. 
But let him never lose sight of the fact that he is 
only in training for his real life. There are few 
more pitiable things than the college-bred man in 
business without business sense^ with a fool notion 
that his education is an end in itself and a title to 
the homage of his associates. He is a failure from 
the beginning to the end of his business career, and 
the distance isn't usually very long." 

Advantages of a general character aris- 
ing from a liberal education alluded to in 
this long extract are even more fully and 
forcibly presented in the several letters 
which follow. 

Mr. E. W. Scott, president of the 

99 



l.sfC. 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

Provident Savings Life Assurance Society, 
writes : 

" In my opinion the principal factors determining 
a man's maximum attainment in the insurance pro- 
fession, as well as in any other, are the industry, 
natural ability, and force of the individual himself. 
Oftentimes the man whose education has not included 
a college or university course, but who may have a 
strong natural endowment of the qualities essential 
to success, will outstrip his college-bred contempo- 
rary; but, in the long run, I believe that the man 
with the college education has the advantage in his 
favor, even if he has to start a little later in life, 
because he is trained to logical and systematic 
thought, and has had the advantage of the higher 
education. 

" Then, too> if he has taken advantage of the 
benefits from the social side of college life, he has 
a large circle of intimate friends, who, at one time 
or another, are apt to be of practical benefit to him. 
The power that a man ought to gain from this less 
strictly academic side of his college career must count 
in such a business as insurance, into which enter 
so largely the strictly personal element, the neces- 
sity of imderstanding men, and utilizing this knowl- 
edge. 

" I think I may say that the personnel of my own 
company bears out the opinion that I have expressed. 
Both in the executive staff of the Provident Savings, 
and among its managers in the different parts of the 

100 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

country, we have many college-bred men, who have 
earned their advancement largely because of their 
education at our leading colleges, which has given 
them valuable preparation for practical work." 

Mr. James W. Alexander, president of 
the Equitable Life Assurance Society, says: 

" Other things being equal, a college education 
gives a man a special advantage in entering the in- 
surance business, as it does in other branches of 
business, because the valuable training he has re- 
ceived fits him to occupy at once a higher and more 
important position than would otherwise be the case. 
On the other hand, there are many positions in the 
office of a life assurance company which are best 
filled by those who make up for a lack of learning by 
the business training which they get beginning as 
errand boys and rising step by step. 

** But I take it that your questions are intended 
to be broad and comprehensive, and if so, the fore- 
going answers are altogether inadequate, dealing as 
they do with only a fractional part of the life assur- 
ance business. 

** It is true that every life assurance company 
must have a corps of officers and a force of clerks at 
headquarters, but its real business is the sale of life 
assurance, and as the business is practised, these 
sales are effected by agents stationed in all the im- 
portant cities, who have representatives stationed at 
smaller places, or who travel from place to place. 

101 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

These are the men who transact the life assurance 
business, and they outnumber twentyfold those who 
occupy office positions. 

" To a young man going into this branch of the 
assurance business, a college training is of infinite 
advantage. Nowadays the life assurance agent can 
not succeed if he is a bore, or if he lacks intelligence, 
or if his manners are uncouth, or if his intellect has 
not been sharpened by training; and in addition to 
what the college student learns from books, the 
knowledge of men which he gains during his college 
career will be of inestimable value to him. All this 
is recognized by those who are at the head of our 
large agencies, and such men are on the lookout for 
college graduates who are willing to engage in our 
business, and a number of cases might be cited where 
young men immediately after graduation have been 
able to support themselves by life assurance while 
they have been learning the business; and the start 
once made, there is no limit to the prospects of a 
man who has the necessary energy and character. 
The progress of a small clerk in a large office is 
usually slow. His horizon is narrow and his oppor- 
tunities are few. There is, on the other hand, a 
broad field for the ambition of an industrious young 
man who takes up what has sometimes been called 
the profession of life assurance. While the highest 
intellectual powers may not be necessary to secure 
moderate success, there is no calling in which every 
talent which a man can bring to bear may be utilized 
to better advantage, and of two young men starting 

102 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

out in life, the one with the college education and 
the experience of college life has greatly the advan- 
tage." 

Robert W. Huntington, Jr., president 
of the Connecticut General Life Insurance 
Company, gives his opinion in the follow- 
ing: 

" I should say that the advantages possessed by 
a college graduate in entering the insurance business 
over those possessed by a graduate of the high 
school or grammar school were: 

" First — He should have some knowledge of 
higher mathematics, which would enable him to get 
hold of the vital principles of the business much 
more quickly and more thoroughly than one who had 
no such knowledge could. 

** Second — That if he entered an office with the 
right spirit he would be able, on account of his su- 
perior advantages in the way of former intellectual 
training, and on account of his increased age, to im- 
press the officers of the company with his intelligence 
and willingness to a much greater degree than the 
younger boy could possibly do. And I think that 
the average graduate of a college enters into business 
with more enthusiasm, more determination to succeed, 
and more realization of the value of hard and intel- 
ligent work, than the graduate of the lower schools 
does. Perhaps the two most common hindrances to 
progress are intellectual narrowness and lack of am- 

103 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

bition. They usually go together. The right kind 
of a boy can not graduate from the right kind of a 
college without having an open mind and high am- 
bitions. And these two qualities combined with what 
may be called doggedness are necessary to ensure 
success. It is impossible to hold a good man down, 
or to push a poor one up, permanently. 

** The only disadvantage that I can conceive of 
which might result from a college education is a 
self-conceit and a feeling of being above one's work 
It is not easy to descend from the study of history 
to the running of errands or ruling red lines with a 
pen. Yet accuracy and despatch are necessary in 
these latter things, and by the way a boy performs his 
small tasks is noticed by his superiors, though he is 
apt to think that such is not the case. There is an 
old feeling among business men against the college 
graduate, in that he is supposed to wish to be presi- 
dent before he knows how to be office-boy. This 
feeling is fast being dispelled by the conduct of the 
average graduate. 

"An incidental advantage which would accrue 
to the graduates of many colleges would be the for- 
mation of friendships with men in different portions 
of the country. These friendships in a business 
which covers as wide a territory as insurance does 
might be of no little value. 

"Referring to your second question, it is very 
difficult to say whether, on the whole, one would be 
safe in advising the boy of eighteen of intellectual 
habits and apparently efficient administrative abil- 

104 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

ities, who desires to enter any branch of the insur- 
ance business,, to go to college^ as of course there 
would be particular circumstances which would arise 
in each case^ but I do not question but that if the 
boy's pecuniary circumstances were such that he 
could do so without too great a sacrifice, that the 
return which he would get from his college course 
in dollars and cents in the course of an average life- 
time would be very large indeed." 

Mr. Joseph A. De Boer, vice-president 
of the National Life Insurance Company, 
writes : 

** Apart from the personal factor which inva- 
riably affects success in any time of life, the college 
graduate has the advantage, in entering the insurance 
business, of a better intellectual training, a greater 
faculty for independent investigation, a large adapta- 
bility to its varied forms of work, a better foundation 
for the broader pr9blems of its applied management, 
and what is by no means unimportant, a better oppor- 
tunity for cultivating and holding important personal 
connections in all the allied forms of work. I can 
conceive of no disadvantage, unless it be one of a 
purely subjective type, arising from the having of a 
college training, as the insurance business is large 
and important enough and sufficient of an art, resting 
upon proximate sciences, to seek for its employment 
the best thought and the best training to be had." 
8 105 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

Mr. John F. Dryden, president of the 
Prudential Insurance Company of America, 
says: 

" There is first the broad division of the business 
into field and office administration. In the former, 
a university education, other things equal, is no 
doubt a distinct advantage. In some departments, 
especially in view of the rapid development of the 
business^ higher education is a prerequisite for suc- 
cess. Self-taught men have done excellent work, but 
they have done so at an almost inconceivable cost 
of mental wear and tear. In the financial_, legal, 
medical, actuarial, and statistical departments the 
chances of success are no doubt largely in favor of 
the college graduate. But natural ability and inborn 
inclination for specialization are of still greater im- 
portance, and without these education in higher insti- 
tutions for learning is perhaps more of a hindrance 
than a help. 

" There must be a natural inclination for the 
intellectual life, combined with strong practical com- 
mon sense. 

" The fact to be kept clearlj'^ in mind by the stu- 
dent is that a college education can only give a broad 
foundation for the w^rk of the future and that in- 
stead of being finished at graduation it is only then 
that the real work of mental development, training, 
and discipline begins. For it is a well-known fact 
that most valuable results in life insurance have been 
achieved by men who were self-taught, but such men 

106 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

were invariably indefatigable workers in the domain 
of action as well as in the domain of thought. They 
were men under the influence of high ideals and gifted 
with a determination indifferent to obstacles and the 
ordinary hardships of the struggle for success. 

" Where these characteristics are present a uni- 
versity education is undoubtedly a great advantage^^ 
in that the faculties are properly trained for effect- 
ive work and a waste of energy and time is usually 
avoided. 

" As to whether it would be advisable for a yoimg 
man of eighteen to go to college as a preliminary 
course of training for effective work in an insurance 
office, the answer is that it would all depend on the 
special branch of the business selected and the special 
course of training adopted. While instruction in in- 
surance principles and practise is not now obtainable, 
except in one or two institutions, a thorough study 
of economics, social and political science, commercial 
geography, mathematics, and statistics is an essential 
requisite for a more effective mental development. 
The business of life insurance is assuming colossal 
proportions and every phase of its activity is more 
or less related to the social^ economic, and even the 
political life of the people. The needs of the future 
will be much more scientific and exacting in view of 
the increasing extent and importance of the business, 
and there will thus arise a demand for the very 
highest mental and general commercial ability. The 
right kind of college education must needs be a very 
considerable advantage to the young man who, with 

lOT 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

a clear conception of his life's purposes, makes a 
deliberate choice of life insurance as a profession or 
as a business pursuit. 

" In the field work of an agent, or solicitor, for 
life insurance a college education is less of a neces- 
sity, but likely to be of valuable assistance to men 
who intend to make their life a more than ordinary 
success. Many of our general agents, or special rep- 
resentatives, are university graduates, and in no 
small measure their success is the result of better 
mental training and a more perfect mental grasp of 
the conditions under which success is possible." 

Mr. W. A. Brewer, Jr., president of the 
Washington Life Insurance Company of 
New York, writes : 

" The advantages of the college graduate in en- 
tering the insurance business are in general those 
possessed by a college graduate in entering any busi- 
ness, namely, wider general information, which is 
always useful and helpful — ^the ability to reason 
more correctly — to express oneself more clearly — 
to write the English language more effectively — ^to 
grasp a new subject more successfully; in particular, 
as regards the life insurance business, a more thor- 
ough knowledge of mathematics, and of the first 
principles of law and at least a fair acquaintance 
with modern languages, notably French, German, 
and Spanish. 

" The disadvantages are that he is temporarily 

108 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

four years behind the school boy in knowledge of 
the petty details of the business: he is therefore 
often humiliated by the apparent superiority and 
value to his employers of the latter; but if he has 
had a college training, he will soon make up the 
arrearage of four years and in the long run far out- 
strip his more poorly equipped competitors. I say 
this with several individual cases in mind to substan- 
tiate the statement. 

" If the young man's sole aim and object in life 
is the accumulation of wealthy I doubt whether a col- 
lege training is an advantage, not as regards him- 
self, but as regards the establishment of his ob- 
ject; the pursuit of knowledge tends to elevate the 
mind and soul above everything that is sordid and 
selfish and therefore to a degree diverts one from 
the pursuit of the * almighty dollar ' ; there is, how- 
ever, a happy medium between one devoted to the 
latter pursuit and one who, as Agassiz claimed for 
himself, is so absorbed in the pursuit of science that 
* he has had no time to make money/ " 

The list of testimonies might be vastly 
lengthened, but I do desire to add to it a 
wise and most interpretive letter from Mr. 
Greene, president of the Connecticut Mu- 
tual: 

** The answers to your questions depend upon the 
particular field of activity for which a boy is fitted 
by natural gifts. The impression is perhaps quite 
general that education creates intellectual power; 

109 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

whereas it simply develops that which is in potential 
existence, trains it to exercise^ equips it with knowl- 
edge, teaches it how to acquire other knowledge and 
how to remove friction and hindrance to balanced 
mental action. But it does not create faculties; nor 
can it increase them; but it can bring them to their 
full. 

" If your boy has got that breadth and power 
of grasp and action that promise efficiency in the 
higher and wider fields of responsibility, give him 
the best training available. If he aims at general 
administrative and executive work, a college training 
will give him the necessary possession of himself, 
and a knowledge of at least the general principles of 
law will both add to the ease of mental action and 
to his handling of daily problems. If he is to deal 
with the actuarial side of the business, he needs a 
mathematical training that he can not get in the high 
schools. He must go to schools of collegiate rank. 

"If his capacity does not promise a wider range 
than that of clerical work, the high school fits him 
sufficiently. 

" If he desires the variety of action found in field 
work, let him take on whatever of training he thor- 
oughly assimilates. It is assimilation that produces 
that open alertness and sympathy which is the best 
result of schooling in any grade. It all depends on 
a man's capacity to receive mental discipline and en- 
largement. You don't make a five-foot man a six- 
footer by putting him into a gymnasium: you can 
only make him a good five-footer, 

110 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

" Of course it is not necessary to say that only 
by giving a boy such and as much training as he fully 
absorbs can you equip him for taking readiest advan- 
tage of those opportunities that will pass before him 
for wider range_, whenever and however he starts in. 
The latter is not the determining question. It is the 
stuff in the boy. If you give him more than he ab- 
sorbs, he will slough it, no matter how much it is 
nor what he undertakes to do: upon which point and 
with reference to the curricula of our public schools 
there is much to be said." 

These letters are, I believe, the most sig- 
nificant statements ever made by the lead- 
ers in a most important department of 
American life touching the value of the 
higher education. They unite upon the cen- 
tral principle that the college aids the man 
entering the business or profession of insur- 
ance to interpret, to weigh evidence, to 
assess a fact at its proper value, to analyze a 
complex condition and to synthetize facts 
and classes of facts which belong together. 
They also agree in expressing the assurance 
that the disadvantage of time belonging to 
the college man may be soon overcome, 
after which he presently outstrips the high- 
school graduate. In this relation it may be 
worth while to add that the Equitable Life 

111 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

Assurance Society in the summer of 1902 
opened a school for agents specially de- 
signed to train only college graduates. 

There is one special advantage belong- 
ing to the college man in insurance, as in 
every great business, which should not be 
passed over. In the education of students 
the teacher notices that certain ones reach 
their natural limitations sooner or at a less- 
advanced stage of progress than other stu- 
dents. Further progress may be made, but 
it is made at heavier costs, and with dimin- 
ishing returns. The same principle or law 
holds in business; some men reach a limit 
of ejfficiency earlier than others. To go far- 
ther means a strain. 

This law holds in insurance. The col- 
lege man reaches his limitations at a period 
or point of efficiency more remote than that 
of the less well-educated man. A Yale 
graduate, now an officer of the Home Life 
Insurance Company, says: 

" I consider a university education as of the great- 
est value. Ever since my graduation from Yale my 
time has been occupied in business^ and I have had 
a good opportunity of studying the effects, direct and 
indirect, of a university education in business life. 

112 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

The impressions which first obtained in my mind 
after leaving college have been strengthened in re- 
cent years by my experience as an employer. I find 
that the average young man seeking employment in 
an office such as mine is eager to succeed, but that 
after pushing such a man forward from one position 
to another I soon discover that his limitations are 
quickly reached and that it is not safe to put him 
in a position where responsibility is placed upon his 
shoulders and where his thinking powers are brought 
into active exercise. Such a man^ having reached his 
limitation, simply falls into a rut and becomes a mere 
human machine. This class is made up largely of 
those men who have simply a common school educa- 
tion and who never paid any particular attention to 
the development of the reasoning faculties required 
in the more advanced positions. On the other hand, 
my experience with young college graduates has been 
that they have, in addition to the qualifications of the 
first class, a certain power of logical thought and 
analysis which I attribute to their educational train- 
ing, and consequently it is possible to use them ulti- 
mately in a much higher sphere than the first class.'* 

Similar testimony is borne by an officer 
of the German Insurance Company, of 
Freeport, 111., who says: 

** Personally being placed in charge of over sixty 
office employees and having been connected with such 
work for over forty years, I find that the work of 

113 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

those having had only the advantage of the studies in 
our elementary schools do not compare with those 
having had more advanced studies; that the former, 
while competent to perform certain duties, almost 
invariably fail to advance, whereas the latter are 
the ones that we can and do use in any kind of work 
and eventually reach the positions requiring knowl- 
edge and exercise of brain power, and which the 
former seldom, if ever, attain. There are excep- 
tions, of course, but they are so few and far between 
that they will not establish a precedent or rule." 

One would be carried too far afield, and 
would enter into ranges of educational dis- 
cussion too professional, to consider the spe- 
cial sort of college training — for there are 
all sorts — ^which one should select who pre- 
fers to enter this business or profession of 
insurance. 

But I venture to affirm that this educa- 
tion should on the whole be characterized by 
breadth. The insurance business itself is 
one of increasing breadth, touching many 
human relations. The college man should, 
as executive or administrator, be prepared 
to take up any one of them and should be 
able to appreciate the conditions obtaining 
in all of those relations. If he prefer to 

114j 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

enter the actuarial department, of course he 
is to be versed in mathematics, up to and 
including calculus. One of the greatest of 
actuaries, Elizur Wright, was a professor 
of mathematics in the old Western Reserve 
College before he became an actuary. But 
because of the variety of the forms which 
constitute insurance, he should seek rather a 
general than a special education. As saj^s 
Mr. George F. Seward, president of the 
Fidelity and Casualty Company of New 
York: 

" A man who is to be successful in insurance is 
like the man who is to be successful in any other busi- 
ness, he must be capable of taking broad views. The 
boy who comes into the office of an insurance com- 
pany at an early age will learn this and that detail, 
but unless an exceptional fellow, will not progress 
greatly in the matters of fundamental concern. The 
college man will be predisposed by his education to 
make general studies and by these only can any one 
secure those broad conceptions that are essential in 
the direction of the business. 

" Men find it necessary to do what they can, not 
what they prefer, and as life goes on to do more 
than one thing usually. The person who imagines 
he wants to be an underwriter is quite likely to turn 
up in a newspaper office, or in the diplomatic service, 
or in the pulpit. The boy imagines he has aptitude 

115 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

for certain work. Later he finds his aptitude or his 
necessities take him in a different direction. 

" I may add the general statement that in my 
judgment education should never be directed in the 
first instance toward any specialty. The foundation 
should be laid broadly at school and at college. If, 
for instance, manufacturing business is to be fol- 
lowed, I would make the course elementary in Ger- 
man, French, mathematics, mechanics, and chemistry 
for the first three years of the college course and then 
elective for the last year. A special training for any 
given thing may be, so to speak, a straitjacket for 
the individual all his life. 

** An elementary broad training fits him to do 
what he later on finds himself best suited to do or 
forced to do and to make later those studies in his par- 
ticular line which must continue for the whole period 
of his career if he is to be successful beyond the 
average. 

" To my mind, the smaller college which does 
not differentiate study overmuch, but does provide 
elementary courses with thoroughness and does bring 
the students into close relations with the members of 
the faculty, is better than the great college with elect- 
ive courses. And the college which takes the young 
men of the neighborhood and teaches them while 
they live at home is the most desirable, for there is 
an education of the affections and on the moral side 
that parents can teach better than professors and 
without which a young man is indifferently equipped 
for the conduct of life, however much he may know 
of the learning of the schools.'* 

116 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

But although a large majority of the 
leaders in the insurance business of the 
United States believe in the worth of a col- 
lege training as giving the best preparation 
for entering this business, a few do not. 
Their views I wish to present. Mr. Fuller, 
of the Boston Insurance Company, says: 

" Taking it for granted that the person in ques- 
tion enters the insurance business at the bottom, as 
he must except under rare circumstances, I should 
say that he possessed no advantages. If, however, 
by possession of exceptional opportunities he entered 
the insurance business, as the saying is, ' through the 
cabin windows,' the college training would give him 
the advantage of knowing how to use his brain. 

" I would say, that I should advise him not to 
go to college in ordinary cases, for several reasons. 
The road to success in the insurance, as well as in 
any other business, is a long one, and the sooner a 
boy starts on that road after he is old enough, the 
better, and the business training strictly in line with 
his chosen profession would, in my judgment, be of 
more value to him than the general training he would 
get in a coUege. Furthermore, a boy of eighteen 
would take more kindly to the necessarily low posi- 
tion which aU must occupy in starting, than a young 
man who has used up four or five years more in going 
through college, not altogether on account of his 
greater youth, but partly (in some cases, at least) 

in 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

because he would not have acquired so large ideas 
of his importance and dignity. It would be per- 
fectly natural that a college graduate twenty-one or 
twenty-three years old would hardly resign himself 
to take orders from clerks ahead of him who might 
be his inferior socially and mentally, with so much 
grace as a boy four or five years his junior and fresh 
from home. Please bear in mind always that I am 
talking of the usual and ordinary course, and in fact, 
confining myself strictly to answering your ques- 
tions as you ask them. I have thought of this sub- 
ject a great deal and realize it is an important one, 
and I have reached a conclusion, in which a great 
many of my friends do not agree with me, that there 
is danger in educating young people above the situa- 
tion which they must necessarily occupy in life." 

An officer of the Sun Insurance Office 
says: 

** On the whole, I incline to the opinion that a 
boy of eighteen possessing the advantages named 
would do better to enter the insurance business at 
once than to take the college course. 

** I speak with some experience on this subject, 
having a son, in his twenty-second year, now a stu- 
dent in the scientific department of one of our lead- 
ing universities. My desire was that on the com- 
pletion of his college course he should adopt the 
law or medicine as a profession, but the bend of his 
mind at this time seems to be toward finance or insur- 

118 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

ance. So far as the necessities of the latter businesses 
occur to me^ these last four years will have been 
practically wasted. 

" In conclusion, I may say, that in this office, 
where we employ between fifty and sixty clerks, the 
only college man we ever had on our staff was prob- 
ably our very poorest clerk. His career at was 

all that could be desired, but unfortunately he was 
unable to get through the earliest stages of our busi- 
ness and ultimately left us to enter the banking busi- 
ness, where, I understand, he has had greater suc- 
cess." 

Mr. A, W. Damon, president of the 
Springfield Insurance Company, says: 

" The principal advantage is, a mind better 
equipped to grasp the problems connected with a 
complicated business. The disadvantages are con- 
fined mainly to those students who imbibe false 
notions in college, such as that book-learning is more 
valuable than, or a fit substitute for good common 
sense, and a dislike for details which must be mas- 
tered. 

" A high school course is quite essential, but be- 
yond that it depends largely upon the young man's 
circumstances and desires. If the time and expense 
necessary for a college course entail serious hard- 
ship upon himself or those supporting him, and if he 
have no decided ambition for a literary or professional 
career, such a boy as you describe may well enter 
upon a business career. If he make a failure of it, 

119 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

it will probably be because of deficiencies which a 
college education would not remove. Much that is 
learned in college can be learned outside if a system- 
atic course of reading is adopted and carried out 
faithfully. A knowledge of mechanics^ electricity, 
and chemistry (the latter because of its bearing upon 
spontaneous combustion) would be especially valu- 
able." 

Mr. E. Y. Richards, of the North Brit- 
ish and Mercantile Insurance Company, 
writes : 

" The bearing that a college education has upon 
the character, attainments, and business success of a 
young man is a subject in which I have always felt 
a keen interest. It has been my fortune for some 
years to occupy a position where it became frequently 
necessary to select young men as beginners in our 
business, and I have closely studied the relative mer- 
its of the boy with and without a college education 
as bearing upon his chances of success in fire insur- 
ance. 

** In the first year or two of service the young 
college graduate when entering an office is at a dis- 
advantage because of his advanced age as compared 
with other young fellows, graduates of the grammar 
or high schools, who have gotten an earlier start, and 
I have found it takes courage and persistence for 
the young man just out of college, twenty-three to 
twenty-five years old, to willingly assume the duties 
ordinarily performed by a boy of sixteen to eighteen 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

years. As a rule, such a young man is unwilling to 
make the attempt, or if starting, is apt to become dis- 
couraged; but, if persistent, he rapidly overcomes his 
early disadvantages, and if possessing the natural 
characteristics needed for success with sufficient am- 
bition and determination, his success in the business 
is more rapid and pronounced than his younger com- 
petitor. 

*' I recommend a college education for every 
young man^ if it can be afforded himj, whether or not 
it is his purpose to become a business man, and to 
the young man with such an education — if his other 
qualifications are satisfactory — I would give the 
preference. But he should understand the disadvan- 
tages he is likely to suffer from in his first years of 
business experience and be sure that he has the cour- 
age and determination to overcome these minor and 
early disadvantages for the greater success that is 
before him." 

As one reads these paragraphs, and as 
one reflects in general upon doing good 
work in the business of insurance, as in 
every other form of human labor, one com- 
prehensive conclusion is made evident. The 
doing of good work depends largely on: 

1. Good health; 2. Intellectual ability; 
3. Good will and strong; 4. Graciousness ; 
5. Good manners. 

One who possesses these five elements or 
9 121 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

qualities should do good work in his business 
or profession, and should win the results of 
such work, results which the Philistine world 
sums up usually in the word " success." For 
the securing of these five points of a practi- 
cal Calvinism I believe the college training 
of three or four years represents the wisest 
method and is the most effective agency. 



122 



V 
IN HUMAN RELATIONS 



123 



IN HUMAN RELATIONS 

For the sake, therefore, of what is known 
as success in great vocations, I beheve it is 
usually wise for a boy to go to college. The 
success which he wishes to win will be finer 
and probably larger, and, even if delayed 
in its coming, when it does come, will be 
greater. 

Yet it should be affirmed, as I intimated 
in the first chapter, that there are boys who 
ought not to go to college. 

" My boy shall go to college even if he 
can not enter imtil he is forty years old," 
said a mother whom I know well and whose 
son I know well. That boy is now more 
than fifty years old, and he has not entered 
college. The reason that he did not go to 
college is the reason which is usually suffi- 
cient to keep any one from going, viz., the 
lack of intellectual interests. A boy may 
really have intellectual interests, and yet 
give to the ordinary observer slight evidence 

125 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

that he does have them. Some boys develop 
late. But parents with knowledge more 
intimate may believe, despite the evidence, 
that their son has such intellectual abilities 
and that he should go to college. Happy 
the parent who has such a true prevision of 
his son's future! Happy the son who has 
so true a prophet in his father! 

A lad, too, may regard his intellectual 
interests and conditions not as of worth 
themselves, but of worth as means to certain 
pieces of work which he wishes to do. He 
may desire to become a tanner or a butcher. 
He knows that these are callings which, in 
their large relations, demand executive and 
administrative ability. He knows that their 
relation to intellectual affairs is not as close 
as the relation of the profession of the law- 
yer or librarian; but he also knows he can 
not properly take up the work of the tanner 
or butcher without having a certain power 
of judgment which is a natural result of 
passing four years engaged in study. The 
boy, therefore, who looks upon intellectual 
interests as means and not as ends need not 
exclude himself from the list of college can- 
didates. Because of his materialistic calling 

126 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

he should be the more eager for an intellec- 
tual life before entering it. 

But the boy who has no, or only slight, 
intellectual affinities and potencies should 
not think of himself as one worthy of getting 
or receiving a college education. I know 
very well that the college contains many ele- 
ments which can not be described as intellec- 
tual. Their value to many students is greats 
College friendships are precious. The great- 
est of modern poems sprang out of such 
a friendship. But if one lack the intel- 
lectual relationship and affinity, he is in 
grave peril of converting opportunities of 
growth into opportunities of disintegration. 
The lack of intellectual interests converts the 
athletic condition from one in which gentle- 
men indulge to one which professionals 
adopt. The lack of intellectual interests 
converts social conditions from possessing an 
unique academic charm into the ordinary re- 
lation of friendship. The presence of intel- 
lectual interests lifts fraternities, societies, 
clubs, and athletics into noble means and 
opportunities for receiving and for giving 
the highest things of life. It keeps the cam- 
pus f rpm becoming a gridiron, and the social 

127 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

parlors from becoming professional ball- 
rooms. The atmosphere of Oxford and of 
Cambridge is something other than mere- 
ly intellectual. These miiversities are the 
mothers of great men and of greater move- 
ments. They have inspired poems which 
will be sung so long as hearts break or hearts 
melt; they color the period of youth in the 
retrospect and maturity in the prospect with 
glories more glorious than richest windows 
set in college chapel can suggest. But be- 
fore and behind all these results, the origin 
and the cause, is the life intellectual. The 
same primacy of intellectual interest is to 
belong to the boy who enters the American 
college. This interest will create other inter- 
ests, some hke, some unlike, the original one, 
which are indeed precious; but if he lack 
the intellectual interest he can not hope to 
secure the other consequent and alUed re- 
sults. 

There are at least two types of boys who 
usually lack intellectual interests to such an 
extent that they should not think of going 
to college. They are what I shall call the 
vain boy and the executive boy. The vain 
boy is the boy of the empty brain, who thinks 

128 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

that his brain is full. He is the boy who is so 
ignorant that he does not know he is ig- 
norant. He is the boy who said, when his 
father told him he could not go to college: 
" Well, then, I will have a new suit of 
clothes." The executive boy is of quite a 
different type. He is the boy who likes to 
do things. Blessings on him! He will be 
of far greater value to the world than many 
a thinker. But he would find the Hfe of 
thought and of learning of the college ex- 
ceedingly dull, tedious, irksome. He should 
not enter the door of that life. He should 
be content with sitting down upon its door- 
step. 

" I am not going to send my son to col- 
lege till he can say no, and stick to it," said 
a father. The remark suggests the truth 
interpretive of the boy of another type who 
should not go to college. It is the boy who 
lacks strength of will. Most wills, like steel 
beams, have a breaking point. I also know 
that the will may yield once or twice or even 
thrice and retain its permanent tension and 
tenacity. But the boy who enters college 
should have the power to hold firmly the de- 
cisions made wisely. For the freshman of 

129 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

to-day finds fewer helps in rules and regu- 
lations for reenf orcing the strength of his 
will than his father and grandfather found. 
It is possible also he may find less help 
in the personal associations of his teachers. 
He is flung into a new world. It is a world 
of equals and superiors. Being a fresh- 
man, he will not be inclined to beHeve it is a 
world of inferiors! It is a condition of 
moral temptations; but it is also a condition 
of general testing. He is his own man and 
master as he has not been. His time is his 
own; he can transmute time into treasures 
more precious than rubies. He can also 
transmute it into pestiferous evils. His 
strength of mind and of heart is also his own 
■ — either to use worthily and to increase it, 
or to use unworthily and to diminish its sum 
and to degrade its possibilities. Into this 
condition of moral freedom, so akin to the 
world of freedom into which God places 
every soul, is put the college student. If he 
is a man who needs restraint, supervision, 
penalties, he should not enter it. If he be 
at all the type of a man who once had an in- 
terview with Dr. Ballou, the founder of 
Universalism in America, he should not go 

130 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

to college. " If I believed as you believe," 
said the man to Dr. Ballou, " I should lie, 
steal, murder." " Yes," replied Dr. Ballou, 
"I think you would; you look it." The 
man who can not do right without fear of 
penalty should not be in college. The col- 
lege is no place for moral invertebrates. 
The only invertebrates which should be in 
college are the biological specimens; and 
they are dead. 

The appetites are, of course, the source 
of pecuhar temptations to the young man 
in college, as they are to all young men. 
These temptations there must be strength 
of will sufficient to overcome. If there be 
not sufficient strength of will to overcome 
them, in the condition of freedom, the can- 
didate for college should remain in his home, 
where he may have the special advantages 
of loving personalities and noble atmos- 
pheres to support his weak will. The temp- 
tation to lie is also a temptation of the col- 
lege, as of all men. It is a temptation which 
usually arises from cowardice. The ten- 
dency to yield to it is among the hardest of 
all the inclinations of the college man to 
eliminate. The man whose will is so weak, 

131 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

whose heart is so craven, that he lies easily, 
should not go to college. Where should he 
go? perhaps some anxious parent may ask. 
The answer to the question would carry us 
too far afield, even if any answer at all could 
be given. 

At this point one should not fail to 
notice that there are colleges and colleges. 
One boy may have a will so weak that to 
enter him at college in which freedom pre- 
vails would be to invite moral suicide. An- 
other boy may enter the same college and 
find in it a condition which creates the 
strongest manhood. The first boy may en- 
ter another college, in which, through gen- 
tle and wise ministries, he may be nourished 
from characteristic weakness into ethical 
worthiness. The second-named boy, enter- 
ing this college, might find his innate 
strength disintegrating and the ideals of 
manly achievement depraved. It would be 
trying to grow oaks in a hothouse. The 
question, therefore, whether a boy should 
or should not go to college is in no small 
degree a question whether he should go 
or not go to a particular college. Colleges 
are not alike, as are spades and peas; col- 

132 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

leges differ quite as much as, and sometimes 
I think more than, human beings. 

Whether one who lacks health should go 
to college is a question of degree and also 
a question of relation. The question of re- 
lation refers to the location of the college, 
and the question of degree refers to the seri- 
ousness of the ill health from which one 
suffers. But it is safe and fair to s^y that 
men should grow stronger in body, as they 
are supposed to grow stronger in mind, 
while in college. The regularity of the daily 
intellectual routine, as well as the regularity 
of physical exercise, taken under proper 
supervision, and the happiness of the life, 
should increase strength and promote health. 
It is also evident enough that men may go 
to colleges in Colorado or Florida who could 
not go to college on the northern Atlantic 
coastboard. 

It is also, sometimes, said that the lack 
of money is sufficient to keep a boy from 
going to college. Lack of money may keep 
a boy from going to college, but it need not. 
Colleges are made for boys of grit, of grace, 
of gumption, and of poverty, of full brains, 
and of empty purses. As a college presi- 

133 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

dent, I am prepared to say that no boy of 
sound health, of strong will, of pure heart, 
of good intellect, who has the knack of help- 
ing himself, should turn away from the col- 
lege gate hopeless. 

But, after all, the two things to be said 
absolutely are these: The boy who lacks in- 
tellectual interests, or the boy who lacks a 
strong will, should not go to college. The 
attempt of a mother or father to send such 
a boy to college constitutes a grave peril for 
the boy. The receiving of such a boy by 
the college constitutes a grave peril for the 
college, lest its fair name as a healthful, in- 
tellectual, and moral force be tarnished. 

But when all has been said regarding 
the type of the boy who better not go to 
college, and also when all has been said 
about the reasons urging the boy to go to 
college in order to become an officer or man- 
ager more efficient in the great business of 
the great world, I find myself unwilling to 
close this little book without saying one 
thing more. The thing which I wish to 
say in these last paragraphs is that a col- 
lege education is worth while for the sake 
of the manhood of the man himself. Man 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

himself is more important than merchandise. 
Character is more precious than a check- 
book. A man's heart is of greater worth 
than his house, be the house a residence or 
a business. One can interpret hf e in terms 
of dollars and become rich. It is well. One 
can interpret life in terms of intellect and 
get truth. One can interpret life in terms 
of will and get force. One can interpret 
life in terms of heart and get joy or exalta- 
tion. One can interpret life in terms of 
conscience and get righteousness and duty. 
One can interpret life in terms of the 
esthetic faculty and get beauty and appre- 
ciation. Each of these results is also well. 
Each of these results is better than wealth. 
Treasures in oneself are better than treas- 
ures outside of oneself. Treasures in one- 
self are lost only by losing oneself ; treasures 
outside oneself may be torn away. It is 
well to discipline the character and to enrich 
the soul by knowing and feeling the noblest 
which man has thought, experienced, and 
expressed. It is well to know what have 
been the problems of man in the successive 
stages of his development ; what methods he 
has found useful in solving them; and what 

135 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

results have followed the solution. To lift 
one out of his own individuality into the 
sphere of reason; to cause one not only to 
recognize that he is born under laws, but also 
to give aid in appreciating the beneficence of 
laws, and to make obedience to these laws 
easy and cooperation with them natural; to 
put one in possession of the accumulated 
treasures of the race; to help one to know 
what he is, where he is, what he should do, 
whence he came, whither he is going, what 
he may become; to train one to set just val- 
ues on all treasures, to estimate movements, 
conditions, forces, at their real value — these 
are some of the purposes which the college 
tries to help the student in gaining. To think 
truthfully, to choose in righteousness and 
wisdom, to appreciate beauty, to feel nobly, 
to increase the number and worth of one's 
relationships and to aid in adjusting oneself 
to these relationships, to give self-knowl- 
edge, self-control, self -development, and 
self -enrichment, to foster social efficiency, to 
promote reverence for all goodness and for 
God, to give graciousness without weakness, 
and strength without severity, to extend the 
boundaries of human knowledge, to make 

136 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

the thinker, the scholar, the gentleman, the 
great liver, the great doer, and the great 
man — these are intimations of the large 
hmnan relations which the college seeks to 
foster. 

Education seeks to make character 
vigorous without making it harsh or boister- 
ous, patient without indifference, conscien- 
tious without being hypercritical, efficient 
without ostentatiousness, symmetrical and 
impressive, noble and self-reliant but sym- 
pathetic with the less worthy, rich in itself, 
but without selfishness. The problem of 
education is not to teach us how to make the 
bow of Ulysses, that bow is made without 
difficulty ; but it is to create men of strength, 
of self-restraint, who can bend the bow. 
The problem is not so much to teach men 
how to get rich, although that may be im- 
portant, but how to use riches after it is 
gained; how to save themselves from being 
crushed by its responsibilities, from being 
smothered by its soft pleasures, or torn in 
pieces by its distractions. The problem is 
not how to get great honor, place, eminence, 
but how to bear the responsibilities which 
great honor always carries along with itself. 
10 137 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

Education seeks to make the individual of 
resource, of the power of initiative, of hon- 
esty and honor, in whom the vision of truth 
is united with the power of doing one's duty, 
in whom tenderness of heart for the suffer- 
ing is justly joined with capacity for moral 
indignations. It seeks to train leaders — in- 
tellectual, ethical, religious, civil. It also 
seeks to lift the whole level of the race to 
broader and clearer seeing, to finer think- 
ing and nobler appreciation. 

At the close of a long period of years 
from their graduation the members of the 
class of 1862 of Harvard College met in a 
formal reunion. The class had and has men 
of large usefulness and of great distinction. 
But one of the members, writing of the 
worth of the education given by the college, 
not for the men who " are getting wealth, 
inventing propellers for the bows of vessels, 
and writing heavy books," but for the com- 
mon men, notes certain of its great satis- 
factions. 

" There is the field of literature. We 
don't have to make it if we can't; it lies 
before us ready-made and inexhaustible. 
There is no out about this. If life goes 

138 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

very hard with us, if disappointment and 
mortification depress us and mock at us, 
there is some God-given book at our hand, 
and in the joy of reading it we soar aloft to 
Heaven." 

But a more personal condition of the 
college times lies in the friendships which 
are there created. It is probable that more 
friends are made in college than in all the 
years following the college period. " The 
old affections of the college days are among 
our priceless treasures. There is something 
very singular about these old class-friend- 
ships. I find as I recall those days that I 
knew very little about the family connec- 
tions and worldly condition of classmates. 
My thoughts didn't run that way. What 
the fellow was in himself was all I thought 
of, and to this day I am sometimes surprised 
at a question about the worldly smTOund- 
ings of some college friend, it seems so odd 
a question ; and then it seems odder still that 
it had never occurred to me to ask the same 
question." 

In addition to friendships and literature, 
the graduate writes of the satisfactions de- 
rived from the fine arts which, if they do not 

139 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

have their originating cause in the college, 
as in certain cases they do, yet are so sup- 
ported and fostered by academic condi- 
tions that their value is largely enhanced. 
" There is music. Some of the favored 
ones among you can draw the highest joys 
of life from the power of musical expres- 
sion. Others can live an ideal life in the 
study or practise of the fine arts; and mu- 
seums, galleries, prints, photographs, and 
books are growing always more accessible 
to us all." 

The Harvard graduate further says, in 
conclusion: "I have hinted at a thousand 
joys and consolations of our maturer life. 
You would arrange them in different order, 
but I know that I have named something 
that is precious beyond words to every one 
or other of you. But I know, too, that I 
have failed so far to speak of things that 
many of you prize as the highest consolations 
in the afternoon of life." ^ 

The results in personal character and 
condition, therefore, are the richest and the 
best. These results the college secures in 
manifold ways. The studies of the course 

* Harvard Graduates' Magazine, September, 1902, pp. 27-30. 

140 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

represent one method. Linguistic studies 
train discrimination and interpretation; sci- 
entific — the power of observation; mathe- 
matical and philosophical studies — the 
power of abstraction; historical studies — 
the quality of comprehensiveness; economic 
studies — the power of analysis and synthe- 
sis; and all literary studies — the power of 
appreciation. Each set of studies trains 
those qualities of character which every other 
set trains, but also each set trains certain 
powers in particular. 

But associations and associates may do 
more than text-book and teacher for the 
student. The college is the place of great 
friendships. The great Darwin once wrote 
to Dr. Hooker that love is far more than 
scholarship or fame. Jowett, Master of 
Balliol, was a noble scholar, but he was also 
a great friend. It is said of him that " al- 
though the genius of Swinburne, the ever- 
active brain of J. A. Symonds, and the vig- 
orous individuality of John Nichol were 
largely independent of his teaching, they 
yet owed to him what was more valuable 
still, the blessing of a friendship which never 
wavered, which gave unstinted help at crit- 

141 



COLLEGE TRAINING 

ical moments both in youth and after-life, 
and would make any sacrifice of leisure and 
of ease to serve them." ^ 

Out of such friendships with teacher and 
fellow student, and out of the other condi- 
tions of academic life, there enters into the 
student what I shall call the atmosphere of 
moral thoughtfulness. Moral thoughtful- 
ness is a mighty need of our age. The age 
is a thoughtful age upon things material. 
The age is also more moral than any age 
the world has known. But the age is not 
an age reflective upon ethical truth. It 
is not seeking to grasp life's problems in 
their more fundamental relations. Neither 
does it seek ways and means for solving 
these problems. The moral thoughtfulness 
which the age lacks the college nourishes. 
It was said of the pupils who came from 
Rugby to Oxford, while Arnold was mas- 
ter, that they were thoughtful, manly 
minded, conscious of duty and obligation to 
a degree which the ordinary man did not 
possess. Such thoughtfulness is one of the 
most precious results of the life and train- 
ing of the American college. It will give 

^ Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 328, 
142 



AND THE BUSINESS MAN 

to each student a self larger, finer, nobler, 
more symmetrical in the relation of intellect 
to heart, of heart to will, of will to con- 
science, more aspiring, having great power 
of achievement, at once more patient under 
difficulty and in triumph more quiet, more 
eager to do the best of which one is capable, 
more willing to be content with that simple 
best, and more determined to extend the 
realm of truth and to promote the kingdom 
of righteousness. 

If a college training fits the graduate to 
become a better business man, it also seeks 
to make him a better man. If. it aids him 
to live without complaint in a " brazen 
prison," and to transmute its brass into gold, 
it also, and more, teaches him to appreciate, 
as Matthew Arnold says, 

** A world above man's head_, to let him see 
How boundless might his soul's horizons be. 
How vast, yet of what clear transparency! 
How it were good to abide there, and breathe free; 
How fair a lot to fill 
Is left to each man still." -^ 

* A Summer Night. 

THE END 



143 



6 19U4 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 596 058 6 




wm 







